Another question: Paused, slow, normal and fast. Got that part.

1) How many minutes in a normal "aging cycle"? How many in a fast one? I've tried to time it, but I keep getting what appear to be weird, non-standard sizes (4-7 min) when on fast mode. I am basing my "cycle" on when a given fish changes it's age from x to x+1. I am clicking on it pretty frequently, so if the cycles were standard size, I'd expect to see a variance of 10-30 seconds, but not whole minutes. Unless that is intentional.

2) Does game speed affect research speed?

3) When a medicine (for example Ick Treatment or Fungal Treatment) says to be applied once every half hour until cured, does that mean Real Life(TM) 30 minutes or game-time 30 minutes? And does that change when in "fast" speed?

Thank you (again) for any information that would help me understand.

Oooh! A primer series on Fish Tycoon! Nifty!

I never got really hung up on the precise timing, but on fast speed it takes about 2 hours for fish to grow up. I've also seen some variance, perhaps to keep us on our toes, perhaps to account for different fishie species and "moods" of the fish, or perhaps that's just how it works.

It wouldn't be very fair if game speed didn't affect research speed, now would it?!?

With the medicines, I completely ignore the instructions and blast the tank with the appropriate medicine until any and all sick fishies in the tank are cured. Sometimes it has taken two bottles of the stuff to cure a stubborn fishie, and who wants to wait HOURS for that!?

Thank you for your answers. However they beg the question: is the game completely time-centric, or does CPU/Platform impact the timing at all. For example, I notice you've listed an hx7400 (you lucky woman...I'm jealous!). Do you notice the game running faster on that platform versus the 4155, or any of the PalmOS devices, or did the developers do the right thing and ignore clock speed and just pay attention to Real Life(TM) Human Time?

And thanx for the advice on using medicine. Was afraid to try that and blow through my money with no return value (and as you know, money is hard to come by to begin with). I've been selling or trashing the fish because some just would not cure after even one bottle and I was afraid to get the others infected. That would be bad.

All of the timers in LDW's real-time games are based on the PDA's system clock (as you put it, Real Life(TM) Human Time), not processor speed. If your PDA clock has trouble keeping time, that could affect your results!

Most developers learned during the transition from the original IBM PC to the PC/AT that relying on the processor speed was a BAD thing to do, as people's action games became suddenly unplayable when they got a new computer! Nobody could keep up with the game.

You'd think they'd learn, but look at many of the games that ran fine on 386s, but were spastically fast (or slow, depending on which game you had) on a 486 of any speed. And since PDA platforms frequently take such small jumps in performance (between models, that is) that it is an easy thing to miss.

Glad they did it right...I'll be upgrading my hardware soon and I'd hate to see my fishies swim themselves to exhaustion.

My fishies behave themselves on all of my PDAs, fast and not-as-fast!