After switching to the selected video mode, the game shows one of it's aquarell-styled paintings, and nothing more happens. Some seconds later, HDD-activity goes low.

Switching to Windows Task Manager then shows 100% CPU for the game exe at about 300MB of RAM.

The logs, activated through eador_mbw.ini, show some (about 100) errors about missing game and profile files, but these seem to be notes about "first-chance"-misses on attempts to locate files that are probably encoded in the large container files of the game.

No logs about errors related to GPU, sound, memory, network setup, nor arrors on anything else then the above mentioned exceptions.

HW-config:
An 1GB AMD C-60 based netbook (rel. good internal GPU supporting at least Shader Model 3), Win7. Internal Display has native 1024x600 pixels (this makes config.exe show an empty list of video-modes), but the overall behaviour doesn't change (except for the config.exe vmode-list) with a 1280x1024 TFT connected via VGA (supporting many of the old 4:3 modes, tried desktop-induced 1024x768).

Sorry, no dxdiag.

I suspect the problem may lie with your GPU - it may be good by netbook standards (equivalent to an Nvidia Ion) but MotBW is stupidly demanding on the graphics side. I'm seeing less than 20 fps with twin GeForce 580GTX's which is ridiculous (with maximum settings, but lowering them shows little improvement).

Eador Genesis however should run great and offers almost identical gameplay.

Well, if a GTX 580 isn't fast enough for the game, it is probably not meant to be bought, yet.

The screenshots on gog definitely show a game, that should run on lower end hardware, also the description of hardware requirements.

On the AMD C-60 with 1GB:
Gothic2, Oblivion, HOMM 5, Anno 1404 all work fine.
Two Worlds, DD2: ego draconis, and many more work, if you're maso enough
Gohic3: laggy, really not playable, even with ugliest settings, probably because of memory usage. But it has problems with lower resolution displays, doesn't work at 1024x600.
Probably because of "pixelwise content".
And it is missing multilanguage support.

Can't argue with that - it does look pretty but runs like a pig. It's understandable for a developer to leave performance optimisation till last (after bug fixing) but this game definitely suffered from a premature release.Oops, overlooked that. Try or [url=http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/603613-d3dwindower/]D3DWindower as detailed in this thread to get Genesis running in a window. It won't fit on a 1024x600 screen but at least you should be able to move it to see the important bits.

D3DWindower might be worth trying on MotBW also.

I'm willing to bet the issue is having 1gb of RAM, unless I misread it. I think the game requires 2gb on Vista and 7. Reason being, it shows 300 gb of RAM in use, but that leaves no room for the OS to operate. That's strange that you would have those issues on 2x 580's. I'm using a 2gb AMD 7850 and having turned off AA, I can say the game is definitely getting more fps than <20.

Sounds odd I know, but have you tried running the game outside of SLI mode? Some games like this one tend to work better with single GPU's as dual GPU setups confuse the program.

Hi,

I have a similar netbook, with a C-50, but with 4gb of RAM.
I happen to have won the game during the sale but haven't tried installing it yet.
I will try later today or in the coming days and see if it works, then post here.

If you can afford, it may be worth upgrading your memory to at least 2gb. I had 1gb when I bought my computer, and it really was limitating when having multiples programs opened at the same time. For games, I don't know because I made the upgrade very soon, but I guess it changes a lot. There are many games that work with my setting, but I'm not very picky on performance issue.

So, I have installed and tested the game. It works, I have played a bit of the tutorial. However, it is not the most pleasing experience: the animations in combat suffer from short freezes, and overall it is not super responsive compared to the good old Heroes games. Playable, but you have to want it.

The loading screen with the aquarel takes a bit of time but passes without problem. Right after launching the game, there is small windows that allows to select the settings and I chose auto-detect which seems to go for low settings without surprise.

Also, I played on my netbook screen with a native resolution of 1280x720. It is not so great for this game, a bit too small.

Yep, and disabling SLI makes no difference (MotBW doesn't use it anyway).

Just to clarify - combat screens seem OK, the low frame rates (mid-teens in my case) occur on the main map. It doesn't need smooth scrolling, which makes this issue annoying rather than game-breaking - but adds to the distinctive eau-de-"not ready for release" odour of the game.

My point was that not everyone is having the lack of frames per second issue. Thanks for posting, though.