Yeah, the bigger towns had lag in the original. I don't how that works, but you'd think with all the extra horsepower that the lag would be all gone. I guess the code would have to be finely altered to get that kind of upgrade.
Good to see someone else playing it! How do you like? If you've got the drum, then you're pretty far.
Something that came with the original game is a big poster-size map of the SoM world. After playing through it again (and still loving it), I realize that having the map for some of the later quests would help
a lot. Here's a link to the original map --
http://secretofmana.planets.gamespy....ges/mapbig.jpg
I actually found some other much more detailed user-created maps through Google, but as they are more walkthrough type maps I won't post them here.