Rune Moberg

Quote: Thank you for your informative response. The CD Crack fixed it. I'm glad you got it working, but I'm angered that it yet again proved to be the anti-piracy scheme that was the culprit. I have a CD writer, but I don't pirate any games. The anti-piracy schemes that the game distributors are blindly using is a provocation that I'm very tempted to respond to. Maybe I should buy a stack of CD-Rs and make copies of all my "protected" CDs and give out to all my friends (and the odd passerby on the street). I can't tell you how tempting that would be. I doubt any court here (Norway) would convict me if I'm not doing it for profit. BTW: When asked why Baldur's Gate II wasn't simultaneously released on DVD, the distributors response was that there weren't any decent copyprotection schemes available for DVDs yet... Result: I didn't buy a game that I had been looking forward to for a long time. Now there's finally a DVD version, but the Norwegian distributor didn't want to import it because it's now considered an old game, and everyone interested (after all) bought the regular CD-ROM based game! (no way am I going to buy a game that occupies more than two CDs! I'd much rather have a single DVD than having to swap discs until dawn!) Grrr. -- Rune

Quote: When i try to run the game nothing happens. When I go to my task manager nascar4.exe is using 100& of the proccessor. I haven't tried that game myself, but in addition to the suggestions you've already received, I'd also try to see if there's a "crack" for Nascar 4 out there. Every game these days it seems, are using C-Dilla "Safe"Disc to "protect" their CDs from ripping. (yeah, sure it works) The downside of SafeDisc (aside from it not protecting anything at all) is that it's incompatible with a wide range of hardware. Early version of it wouldn't support Win2k and new versions have issues with certain CD drives, and stuff like that. (some Dell laptops will bluescreen if you install software from a SafeDisc "protected" CD under NT4) Next, IRQ 16 doesn't exist. You're probably thinking of 15? IRQ sharing is not a big problem, and certainly not at the level you're seeing (a single process burning CPU is not an indicator of an IRQ problem). 100% CPU usage is normal with most games, so I wouldn't worry too much about it either. What would be interesting to gauge OTOH is memory usage. Does the process gobble up memory faster than you can shake a stick at? E.g. "Need For Speed: PU" needs to have a tweaked pagefile size in order to work properly, otherwise it'll just sit there and eat memory while showing the "loading" screen. Are you running any Anti-Virus software? Disable it and try again. Also try lowering priority of the nascar process. I once managed to get Falcon4 to load faster when it's priority was bumped down a notch (this was during the Win2k beta, I suspect the disk cache was run at too low a priority and thus wasn't given CPU cycles at all). Switching the game over to using OpenGL is probably an excellent idea as well (I realise it has already been suggested, but I think it's worth mentioning again). IMO, NVidia drivers have generally favoured OpenGL, both performance and feature wise. -- Rune

Quote: Don't know exactly how to help you on this. Under Win2k, I had to delete the gimme.dll file to run this game no matter what video card I used. I did a clean install of RC1 with my ATI Radeon 64 DDR and installed the game....muns fine without changing anything. I believe deleting gimme.dll is an absolutely last resort solution. It will ruin all chance of playing this game in multiplayer mode, and might also cause other adverse effects. See my thread in the other forum (the Win2k Games forum) about this. The key (IMO) is to set pagefile to a certain size. E.g. I've got 256MB of physical memory, and have a pagefile of 384MB (min/max). A friend of mine has more physical memory and an even larger pagefile. Without locking the pagefile size, NFS seems to allocate until it (or your computer) turns green in the face. It'd be interesting to know whether compatibility mode in XP sets a max limit on memory that is available to the process. -- Rune

Quote: Greetings all, standard, I've been unable to get any games to run under Windows 2000 Professional (SP1 or 2). Here's what happens: I can install a game fine, but when I go to run the program, it won't load. If I use a no-CD hack, games will run perfectly - so I know it has to be something FWIW: I have this problem with older SafeDisc "protected" titles. MacroVision made some changes two years ago (IIRC) that solved the major Win2k issues. Games such as Settlers 3 (I had to return it), DiscWorld Noir (I aquired a crack) and a couple of others released around that period of time, simply wouldn't run properly. Oh, the reason I returned Settlers 3 was that they opted to introduce seemingly random errors (iron turning into meat IIRC -- a play on the phrase "pig iron") if the copyprotection scheme thought you were playing with an unoriginal CD. What a waste of time that was on my part trying to figure out what the h--- was wrong! :-( But there are still issues. E.g. some Dell laptops (I think certain Latitude models) running NT4 will simply bluescreen if you try to install from a SafeDisc "protected" CD. Dell refuses to fix the issue, and surprise, surprise, the game publishers refuses to remove the SafeDisc "protection". I'm sure that if you look into this, you'll discover that the time and resources spent on support alone wrt the SafeDisc "protected" software titles far outweighs the potential loss of sale had they not been "protected" in the first place. Specially seeing as SafeDisc "protected" titles makes the customer feel like a thief. I.e. you're suspected of wrongdoing already before you buy the title. -- Rune

FWIW: My buddy who has 512MB memory says his pagefile is set to Initial: 768 Maximum: 1536 Recommended: 766 Current: 768 Registry: 18 MB He says he hasn't touched anything (i.e. that this was the default). -- Rune

I recently helped a buddy of mine with NFS:PU, and after having tried everything (removing gimme.dll, re-installing SP1, different video drivers, etc) we finally set his pagefile to a fixed size. We both got 256MB of memory and our pagefiles are now locked to 384MB (min/max). A third friend of mine has 512MB RAM and NFS works just fine there too. (I don't know his pagefile settings) Important: Do not remove gimme.dll. It's a big no-no if you have any desire whatsoever to play this game over a network. (and who knows what other bizarre behaviour the removal will trigger?) SP2 didn't break anything for me. -- Rune

I've been buying quite a lot of games recently, and I can't help notice that the ones with copyprotection are the ones that has caused me the most trouble... (seems strange paying for a thing, and then it won't work because it thinks you've pirated it...) Anyway, I'd like to get up to speed on the subject. What are your experiences? Are there any C-Dilla protected games that do work? I know that on my computer, Dungeon Keeper 2 and Need For Speed High Stakes won't run. (although the NFS-HS demo works fine) Worms Armageddon refuses to do much good. Settlers3 worked for a while (the copyprotection triggers a "bug" in the game: trees won't grow and you won't be able to create weapons). Then there's "Commandos: Beyond The Call of Duty". At first only the tutorial ran, and then Eidos released a patch, which in fact did solve the problem with the main game... (I suspect the patch either upgraded the C-Dilla crap, or disabled it) The european edition of "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" used something different than C-Dilla I think, but what solved it in the end (for me) was that I got hold of the original US executable (which wasn't protected!). Without it, the game just crashed during startup. These are all the games I can think of right now. I'd like to know if there are more of them. (and if there are a couple of them that actually do work under Win2K RC1) What to look for: C-Dilla protection creates a small launcher (roughly 250K executable) which loads the main executable which now has an .icd extension. If your game has a big fat (usually a couple of megs) .icd file, then it's likely C-Dilla protected (in which case the smaller executable will have the string "C-Dilla" embedded somewhere). My goal? To get the industry aware of the problem, and either force the banishment of crappy copyprotection, or atleast make it Win2K compliant (duh!). My dream would be to gather up a bunch of people and march down to the C-Dilla guys' headquarters and burn the place to the ground. :-) -- Rune, games are a serious business