Adam Parker
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Vista

Thu Nov 22, 2007 10:01 pm

Got my new Vista machine and hoping to load BoA and ACW up tonight.

I thought I saw a thread on Vista but can't find it.

Are there any steps I need to take to get these games running in Vista if need be?

Specs: nVidia GeForce 8800GTX 768MB, integrated sound and a 3.0GHz rig running 4MB of DDR2 800.

Many thanks in advance.

Adam (can't wait to get playing!)

ird
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Location: Scunthorpe, England

Thu Nov 22, 2007 10:11 pm

ACW works fine. You get an error message when you exit the game but it doesn't affect anything. There is a link somewhere on the ACW forum to correct this. I downloaded from the link and it did sort it. But don't worry if you can't find it cos like I said, the error message doesn't spoil anything, you just click ok when it comes up after you've exited the game. Not got BOA yet so can't help you on that one

wryun
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Thu Nov 22, 2007 10:56 pm

BOA works fine for me; only the settings application gives an error on exit, but that's not a problem.

Adam Parker
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 1:45 pm

Thank you gentlemen and to the AGEOD team a BIG congratulations! :coeurs:

Both Birth of America and American Civil War run fine on initial play test under Vista.

On exiting ACM I did get a kind Vista reminder that the game was "missing a component".

Well, following the advice above, I found the missing DLL thread in the ACW Technical forum, downloaded the DLL from the link provided and dropped it into the ACW directory - no message thereafter.

Look, to be honest I now must get into these games and have them running for a good while to make a final report. But on first look, VISTA Ultimate loves these games! :hat:

And by the way - on my new 20" LCD these games look absolutely fantastic - a whole new gaming experience :D

richfed
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 1:55 pm

NCP works fine on Vista, as well.
[color="DarkRed"][SIZE="2"][font="Book Antiqua"]"We've caught them napping!"[/font][/size][/color]

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Sunray
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 6:58 pm

I had a problem too the first time I tried to start BoA on my new Vista computer. I had a very brief message, something like
"[97] debugger detected", and the game did not started. But I installed the last update 1.12a and it then worked like a charm...

Hope it helps

Cheers

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MarkShot
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Fri Nov 23, 2007 10:03 pm

I went out of my way to make sure that Vista wasn't on my machine I bought this year.

MS is going to support XP until 2014.

Why Vista? Except for DX10 only games, Vista requires more hardware without delivering more performance, security, or stability. Yes, I know they say that Vista is more secure and perhaps vanilla Vista is more secure than vanilla XP. But anyone who runs Vanilla MS O/S without anti-virus, firewall, spyscanner is playing a dangerous game. My point is that it is they third party utilities that really make any system secure.

So, why Vista?

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Hell Patrol
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Sat Nov 24, 2007 2:53 am

Adam Parker wrote:
On exiting ACM I did get a kind Vista reminder that the game was "missing a component".

[/I] :D
You are correct Adam, at ACW's release i installed it on my Vista laptop and found out from Pocus that a file was available but only Microsoft was allowed to distribute it. IIRC there was a link posted in the ACW forums to this file, after i dd'ed it i no longer received the error message. If you want try searching the forum for "vista threads" or posts by me "Hell Patrol"...i know i was the first to bring this up at release.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau

[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

tagwyn
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Sat Nov 24, 2007 5:09 am

How nice you have such a nice system. Not all of us can be so lucky/rich. T

Adam Parker
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Sat Nov 24, 2007 6:16 am

I don't know which country you live in Tagwyn for cost pricing but I didn't mean to come across as boasting.

I've had my former XP machine now for 4 years and it gave great service but it was slowing, it couldn't be upgraded and it wasn't keeping up with today's needs.

Even Nero 8 now asks for 256 Mb video RAM out of the box.

My new computer plus monitor was made to spec and it cost less than my first PC in 1995 which was just a Pentium 100 with 1Gb Hard Disk and 16Mb RAM!

I was fresh out of university then - I used a typewriter to get my Degree :p leure:

Prices have fallen today big time, so much competition.


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helm123
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Thu Jan 10, 2008 2:13 am



Those are the worst test scenarios I have ever seen performed by someone that wants to be creditable. :bonk:

They want there tests to be seen as good information when they hamstring Vista with 1gig of memory. :tournepas Heck the last time I ran one Gig of memory in a machine was WIN98.

Should have run another test with WIN98 up against a XP box running 256MB.

I have a system running Vista 32 on one partition and XP on the other and XP is slower in almost all areas. If I was running Vista 64 the difference would be even worse.

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Pocus
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Thu Jan 10, 2008 9:48 am

You are much above the averages helm123.

My educated estimates, based on the hundreds of mails received at support:

A significant number of people had 512 Mb of RAM when BOA was out (fev 2006).
The majority of people had only 1024 Mb of RAM when AACW was out (april 2007).
Roughly half of people have only 1024 Mb of RAM right now. Perhaps a bit less.

I often see new configs, laptops included, which were bought a few months ago, with Vista, and having only 1024 Mb of RAM.
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Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law."

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helm123
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Fri Jan 11, 2008 12:52 am

Pocus wrote:You are much above the averages helm123.

My educated estimates, based on the hundreds of mails received at support:

A significant number of people had 512 Mb of RAM when BOA was out (fev 2006).
The majority of people had only 1024 Mb of RAM when AACW was out (april 2007).
Roughly half of people have only 1024 Mb of RAM right now. Perhaps a bit less.

I often see new configs, laptops included, which were bought a few months ago, with Vista, and having only 1024 Mb of RAM.



Pocus,

I'm sure that those numbers are correct, but what also suprises me is that people do no research before purchasing that new machine. I build my own machines so I put plenty of research into the process of picking components and after the CPU the memory is the most important part of any machine.
I always have to inform family members on computer purchases as they ask my opinion about the purchase and 9 out of 10 times the computer has insufficient memory for doing anything other than email and web surfing.

My wifes sister purchased an Compaq desktop loaded with 512MB of memory and XP for her son on Christmas two years ago. She also picked up Madden 2005 at the same time. Imagine their surprise when the game turned the whole system unresponsive after loading. It's now fuctioning as my Linux server.

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MarkShot
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Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:59 am

Helm,

A few points:

(1) Win98 SE does not support more than 512Mb. On my last system from 2002 with 1024Mb of RAM, I had it set up dual boot (multi-partitions) Win98 SE and Win XP Pro. I had to modify, I believe, the vcache parameters in the SYSTEM.INI to get Win98 SE to boot. I had to hide the extra memory.

(2) The sweet spot for Win98 SE was 256Mb of RAM.

(3) The sweet spot for Win XP is 1024Mb of RAM.

(4) My guess would be that Vista's sweet spot would be around 2Gb or more as it has a much bigger footprint than XP.

(5) For the same hardware platform Vista delivers less performance without delivering additional features that make the performance drop a worthwhile tradeoff. The same was not true of 98 and XP. 98 delivered generally snappier response on less hardware than XP, but XP provided for greater stability and much greater concurrency. Besides 98's memory limit of 0.5Gb, 98 was limited in concurrency due to its small heap size and GDI architecture. Now, when comparing XP and Vista, Vista adds little in terms of features. I think the biggest argument is for a better security architecture with Vista, but at this time XP is more mature than Vista. Also, whether it is XP or Vista, most serious security solutions revolve around third party products in either case.

(6) If you stay in the realm of 32 bit, you are pretty much capped taking advantage of physical memory beyond 3Gb. Running Vista means less of that will be dedicated towards applications and games and more for the O/S.

(7) Neither XP nor Vista make good use of today's multi-core CPUs. Neither operating system is capable of dynamically load balancing a set of running processes and threads.

(8) I plan to run XP until 2014 when it will official be dessupported. I recently got a new machine, I made sure to order it with XP.

(9) I think Vista is ultimately going to be for the NT Kernel family what Windows ME was to the 9x family ... a poor stepping stone between the old to the new which had few redeeming qualities.

(10) Here is Gate's himself having trouble containing his criticism of Vista. :)

http://gizmodo.com/342920/holy-crap-...ws-sucks?%21??

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Pocus
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Fri Jan 11, 2008 11:03 am

(8) I plan to run XP until 2014 when it will official be dessupported. I recently got a new machine, I made sure to order it with XP.

Same for me. My new machine (a laptop) is on XP. The official rational is that we already have a dev on Vista. But frankly, Vista is for me the new Windows Millenium.
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Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law."

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helm123
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Fri Jan 25, 2008 12:51 am

To each his own I guess. I now run everthing under Vista except for CMBB since it has difficulty with any of the new drivers for Vista. Also you should really check out one of the DX10 capable games. Call of Jaurez is simple stunning in DX10, even made me squint when looking directly a sunlight coming through a window in game.

Mark you are indeed correct about the limitation on memory with 98.

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MarkShot
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Fri Jan 25, 2008 1:17 am

Well, I have enough disk to run Vista on a separate partition. I had thought that one day I might do that, but it doesn't seem too likely. I am playing lots of older games these days. Many under DOSBOX. So, there is little pushing me to upgrade to Vista for my games.

I think the most environments which I ever ran on one machine was via multi-booting was: DOS/Windows for Workgroups, OS/2, Windows 95, and Linux.

What I really regret is that I have 4 processors and I only make very limited use of them. I have done my own load balancing via scripting and IMAGECFG (a Microsoft utility for setting an EXE's affinity).

P0: Most small applications.
P1: Browsers, email, word processing, and other main applications.
P2: Run background scripts that support my games or run second game simultaneously if playing two games at once.
P3: Run my game processes.

* Note, I often run games (especially older ones in a window) and I have a 21.3" LCD and 20" CRT giving me the maximum flexibility with older games.

The nice thing is that on my 2002 single processor machine, things like running email in the background used to cause a hit to my games running in the foreground. Or an old game that had a poorly coded loop architecture would suck my CPU dry and require scripting to automatically demote priority when it lost focus. I no longer need to worry about any of that. Games are not impacted at all by email and browsers. In the meantime, I do not need to worry about a game sucking up all the CPU, since the game can have its own CPU to suck on if it wants it.

However, I would still prefer if the OS could do all the load balancing itself and maximize my hardware utilization.

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helm123
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Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:19 am

Indeed I have this machine set up with Vista, XP and Fedora partitions that I boot into when needed.

Haven't gone into any scripting to get my Quad core seperating tasks the way you have.

I may be incorrect here but I believe both XP and Vista support the use of dual cores but the problem comes down to the application being multi threaded for the use of the multi core enviroment.

It would be really nice if more aplications would comw out that take atvantage of the multi core enviroment most users are now running.

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