My Holiday Gift

[MarkShot]

Here is a holiday gift. I bought AE last night. Don't post questions for me, I am do not plan to stay on the Matrix Forums.

I suspect most of you in this day and age are running 64 bits. This is only going to help if you are on some 64 bit version of Windows; the version does not matter XP to Win11 is fine.

Let's talk about memory space. A 32 bit install of Windows will only run 32bit games. You will hear people say that games will only be able to address 4Gb of memory; not matter how much is installed. This is not technically correct. A game will be able to access about 2.3Gb of memory ( you see this in Windows sys info which shows the version). Why? About 1.7 Gb of memory is reservered for mapping peripherals like your memory card, sound card, ... this is how data is communicated.
But when you run a 64 bit install, games can have 4Gb to play with.

WITP-AE has been linked with the bit on to limit it to 2Gb. Why would Matrix do that? Well this means it is going to work for everyone. (But if I was doing the installer, I would have handled both 32 bit and 64 bit machines.)
So this post and images following show you how to get access to 4Gb of RAM. What should you see if you do this? Turns may run slight faster as the map is moving faster. I expect this will make the most difference for PBEMers running the EXTENDED map. But even with stock you are going to see this. (Also, this may make a difference if you use art mods. As I saw the readme, and they say reload if a ship or plane comes up a white blank. You are basically doing memory recovery manually.)
Map scrolling slows down after your first turn in the GC, since all your assets get loaded. You can compare by scrolling China (turning roads on; stock map); it should faster with more memory to work with. You can also see this playing full screen and ALT-TAB speed to your desktop. Again I expect PBEMers with the EXTENDED map to see the biggest bump.
So, the follow posts will show you how to change your EXE header. (This should work with any version of WITP-AE you run with.)

BACK UP YOUR ORIGINAL EXE!

BACK UP YOUR ORIGINAL EXE!

BACK UP YOUR ORIGINAL EXE!

You can either search for "4gb_patch" which automates this, or do it by hand and search for "CFF Explorer" and follow below. TW players with modded old games (32 bit) have been doing this all the time.

[MarkShot]

First screen ?c

[MarkShot]

You want check the box with handle 2Gb ?c

[MarkShot]

That's it. Back up your original.

[MarkShot]

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

OVER & OUT

[morphin]

Thank's Mark

[LBrown]

Thanks Mark! Found “4gb_patch” utility and it worked like a charm. The extra memory speeds thinks up some. Noticed it most when viewing supply path.

[michaelm75au]

A note of warning.
Some builds of AE had the 'large address aware' bit tuned on so to make most use of memory - 1126b didn't apparently. But this may cause issues if you are using a DX9 64-bit version.
For the next build, we are putting 2 EXEs into the package - one with the bit enabled and one without it.
If the normal build fails to start DX9, then you should try the alternate build.

[btd64]

Michael, is this the right thread for this message?....GP

[Kull]

ORIGINAL: michaelm75au

A note of warning.
Some builds of AE had the 'large address aware' bit tuned on so to make most use of memory - 1126b didn't apparently. But this may cause issues if you are using a DX9 64-bit version.
For the next build, we are putting 2 EXEs into the package - one with the bit enabled and one without it.
If the normal build fails to start DX9, then you should try the alternate build.

To clarify, is this solely an issue with DirectX 9? If so, players can easily find which version of Direct X is on their PC. Assuming you have Windows 10 (or another "recent" version), type dxdiag in the Search box on the bottom left of your screen and hit "Enter". This will run a diagnostic tool that takes about a minute (be patient). When it's done, you'll get a report that looks something like the attachment. Since I have DX12, presumably there's no problem?

[Ian R]

Kull's computer is better than mine, I only have 8192Mb of ram .

I am however on DirectX-12