Help with CD Rom game…

I have been playing the board game of A&A for about six years, and love the game thoroughly. I picked up the CDROM version at Walmart for a few bucks about a year ago. The game, when patched, seems to work quite well, but I HATE playing it beacuse of the cd requirement. The CD spinning in the drive makes a heap of noise and slows everything down, and the sound, though you can turn it to 0 vol, cannot be disabled, so you have to wait for audio loading and such. I have looked around for a NOCD crack of some sort, something to kill the audio and video and free me from having to switch discs all the time, but I couldn’t find a single one that worked. I must have found upwards of 20 sites offering a few different cracks that claim to be for A&A but every one of them is actually made for blitz.

That’s a whole nother story. I downloaded blitz off the website for free, the one that was linked on this forum on another post (its a legal free offerring from the developers) but it runs pretty assy. I use windows XP and unless I run it in win98 compatibility mode, it runs unusably slow. However, even when I set 98 compatibility, after playing in the game a minute or two, it slows down to unusable speeds as well.

If anyone knows a fix for that problem, then I won’t have to keep looking for a crack for the original game, but this really sucks how all the digital versions of the glorious game are total crap.

Thanks for any help that can be offered.

Yes, I tried setting the volume to the lowest setting, but that did not solve the devilry. I have, however, noticed that the games runs at acceptable speeds in single player mode. It’s only in multiplayer that it takes a big shit. Whether I host or just join does not affect that. It is bogged down regardless.