Trying to run Half-Life on an archaic computer; Can it work?

[blooregardo]

I like toying around with older computers, and I have an old Compaq Presario 1245 (circa 1998-99) with Win98SE that I'm trying to get Half-Life to work on, just for the hell of it, really.

It does run Half-Life, but at a ridiculously slow framerate (literally like 3 frames per second). Is there any way to perhaps tweak any settings for a faster, more playable framerate?

There's no urgency here, I've played Half-Life several times before and if I need to play it again I have computers that will run it, I just want to see if it will work.

[Drumdevil]

Try to find the latest DirectX and videocard drivers.
All you can try to do really.

[bohb]

The Presario 1245 has an AMD K6/2 333 and an ATI RAGE II, you aren't going to get HL to run at a respectable frame rate.

The entire RAGE line of GPUs were plagued by hardware bugs, bad drivers and severe performance issues due to a weak polygon setup engine. Most of the work was handed off to an already burdened host CPU, causing more performance issues. The RAGE series was also notable for having buggy and incomplete OpenGL support, so if you're using OpenGL rendering, that's the biggest cause of the terrible frame rate.

The only way you're going to get HL running on that laptop at not slideshow frame rates is to either use the buggy Direct 3D renderer (the sole reason for Valve adding it was because they knew many cards of the day could not run OpenGL.) or run in Software mode.

You could also give it a minor performance boost by replacing the CPU with a faster one, like an AMD K6/2 550.