Vista, Games and Headers

Well having just had to have manually patched a third .exe from a game of
mine to let it run in vista without eventually imploding as memory usage goes
up, I felt it was time to get an answer to this...

So basically certain apps don't have header files included in their
executables to address more than 2GB of memory and if they so happen to
approach 2GB of memory usage (as pretty much any game now is very capable of)
you WILL crash.
Games I have personally had to patch to this effect so far:
Supreme Commander - would crash to desktop after 30mins of a 6player+ game,
one manual patched .exe later yay it works.

Stalker - would crash on full settings after loading into a few areas, one
manual patched .exe later, yay it works

and just five minutes ago, Armed Assault - would crash seemingly after 10-20
minutes of play, one patched .exe later, and yay it works...

So a couple of questions on this to anyone who may know the answers:
1) Is this Vista's fault or the games developers?
2) how many more games am I going to have to patch by myself to make work in
vista? am I going to be doing this with every game I buy for the forseeable
future or is a vista patch in the works or something?

Signed,
Increasingly agitated vista gamer. <3

My Specs for reference:
Core2Duo E6600
2GB DDR2
GF 8800GTX (768MB)

"Spektor" <Spektor@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:B877FE02-D92C-4E92-9474-907C21F3EA9C@microsoft.com...
> Well having just had to have manually patched a third .exe from a game of
> mine to let it run in vista without eventually imploding as memory usage
> goes
> up, I felt it was time to get an answer to this...
>
> So basically certain apps don't have header files included in their
> executables to address more than 2GB of memory and if they so happen to
> approach 2GB of memory usage (as pretty much any game now is very capable
> of)
> you WILL crash.
> Games I have personally had to patch to this effect so far:
> Supreme Commander - would crash to desktop after 30mins of a 6player+
> game,
> one manual patched .exe later yay it works.
>
> Stalker - would crash on full settings after loading into a few areas, one
> manual patched .exe later, yay it works
>
> and just five minutes ago, Armed Assault - would crash seemingly after
> 10-20
> minutes of play, one patched .exe later, and yay it works...
>
> So a couple of questions on this to anyone who may know the answers:
> 1) Is this Vista's fault or the games developers?

The game developers could carry out better memory management, and they could
definitely come up with something other than the application falling over
completely.

Ultimately the game developers should be taking steps to avoid this, GPG and
others should be compiling their applications with the flag marked.

> 2) how many more games am I going to have to patch by myself to make work
> in
> vista? am I going to be doing this with every game I buy for the
> forseeable
> future or is a vista patch in the works or something?

Windows XP would suffer from the same issue, so this is not related to
Windows Vista.

Ultimately we're approaching the ends of 32-bit computing, so things are
getting tight memory wise. You could run Windows with the 3GB switch (but
that could result in a performance impact especially with multiple users
logged on), but alas the applications would still need to be large address
aware to make use of that, and they should be compiled for that.

We need to move to 64-bit, that's the real solution.

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/
http://www.windowsresource.net/

*Remove nospam. to reply by e-mail*

That's interesting and may explain some issues I've seen.

How do you patch your .EXE files ?

Peter Lawton

"Spektor" <Spektor@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:B877FE02-D92C-4E92-9474-907C21F3EA9C@microsoft.com...
> Well having just had to have manually patched a third .exe from a game of
> mine to let it run in vista without eventually imploding as memory usage
> goes
> up, I felt it was time to get an answer to this...
>
> So basically certain apps don't have header files included in their
> executables to address more than 2GB of memory and if they so happen to
> approach 2GB of memory usage (as pretty much any game now is very capable
> of)
> you WILL crash.
> Games I have personally had to patch to this effect so far:
> Supreme Commander - would crash to desktop after 30mins of a 6player+
> game,
> one manual patched .exe later yay it works.
>
> Stalker - would crash on full settings after loading into a few areas, one
> manual patched .exe later, yay it works
>
> and just five minutes ago, Armed Assault - would crash seemingly after
> 10-20
> minutes of play, one patched .exe later, and yay it works...
>
> So a couple of questions on this to anyone who may know the answers:
> 1) Is this Vista's fault or the games developers?
> 2) how many more games am I going to have to patch by myself to make work
> in
> vista? am I going to be doing this with every game I buy for the
> forseeable
> future or is a vista patch in the works or something?
>
> Signed,
> Increasingly agitated vista gamer. <3
>
> My Specs for reference:
> Core2Duo E6600
> 2GB DDR2
> GF 8800GTX (768MB)
>

"Peter Lawton" <dummy@dummy.domain> wrote in message
news:%23WkSKu$uHHA.1168@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> That's interesting and may explain some issues I've seen.
>
> How do you patch your .EXE files ?

You'd need something like Visual Studio with editbin.exe then you can run
that and it can enable largeaddressaware, for example running:

editbin.exe /LARGEADDRESSAWARE SupremeCommander.exe

But saying that some copy protections may balk at having the exe modified.
I know some chap posted up a modified exe on the GPG Supreme Commander
forums, whose disc check was removed in an official patch anyway.

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/
http://www.windowsresource.net/

*Remove nospam. to reply by e-mail*

Thanks, I'll give it a try

Peter Lawton

"Paul Smith" <Paul@nospam.windowsresource.net> wrote in message
news:9C88D718-0E6F-49A4-A15D-B40F079A088A@microsoft.com...
> "Peter Lawton" <dummy@dummy.domain> wrote in message
> news:%23WkSKu$uHHA.1168@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
>> That's interesting and may explain some issues I've seen.
>>
>> How do you patch your .EXE files ?
>
> You'd need something like Visual Studio with editbin.exe then you can run
> that and it can enable largeaddressaware, for example running:
>
> editbin.exe /LARGEADDRESSAWARE SupremeCommander.exe
>
> But saying that some copy protections may balk at having the exe modified.
> I know some chap posted up a modified exe on the GPG Supreme Commander
> forums, whose disc check was removed in an official patch anyway.
>
> --
> Paul Smith,
> Yeovil, UK.
> Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User.
> http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog/
> http://www.windowsresource.net/
>
> *Remove nospam. to reply by e-mail*
>
>