C&C Generals and the ill fated athlon x2's

[Major_PK]

Well guys, im sad to inform you all that i now have a new excuse for not entering any generals tournies (the old one was cos i lasted like 10 secs against you raiping rushing peeps lol). Zero Hour doesnt like athlon 64 X2's. The dual cpu prevents it from loading and you get lovely nice errors informing you that you need to have a minimum directx8.1 or that virus software is the problem, or even that the hardware doesnt meet minimum specs. After several emails with ea we have tracked it down to the said problem - dual cpus. Im waiting to find out if there is anyway i can force zero hour to start everytime in single cpu mode. I can do it via task manager, but you get like 3 seconds tops to change the affinity of generals.exe to 1 cpu and like 1 sec to do the same for game.exe. 9/10 times i dont make it. If anyone else has the game and an athlon x2 please try it and get back to me if you get it working. Also, if anyone knows of a program that forces certain programs to run in 1cpu mode then plz let me know too. It can be done, GPXPatch for Grand Prix 4 has a tick box option for setting it to just 1 cpu - otherwise its like watching a slideshow - the game runs so fast that it has to stop every 2 secs to catch up lol!!!

cheers all,

PK

 

[Cerridwen]

OK, i see no one has replied to this but i shall [even if it is 6 months late]

1. I cannot be held liable for any damage caused to hardware or software by doing the following.
2. Breachlan cannot be held liable for any damage caused to hardware or software by doing the following.

Dual-Core CPU Issues

If you run a dual core CPU, such as a Pentium D or AMD X2, or even a Pentium 4 with HyperThreading, you may notice that the game has a range of problems, such as not loading up properly. To resolve this issue, use one of the methods below:

Setting Processor Affinity Manually: Launch Thief: Deadly Shadows, and as soon as the game appears to begin loading, or after it has loaded up, press CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Task Manager. Under the Processes tab, find the t3.exe and t3main.exe processes, right-click on each one, select 'Set Affinity' and in the box which appears, untick 'CPU 1'.

Setting Processor Affinity Automatically: If you want to force the game to only use one of your CPUs automatically each and every time you run the game, see the instructions here for using the Imagecfg utility, a small Windows NT file you can safely copy into your \Windows\System32 directory and then use to permanently set the affinity for particular programs. I recommend you backup your t3.exe and t3main.exe files before applying this tweak, as the only way to undo it is to restore the original .exe files. Furthermore, note that you may have to redo this tweak each time you patch the game, since the executable will change.

Both these methods basically force the system to effectively see, and use, only one of the CPU cores on your dual core CPU to run the game, thereby resolving this problem.

 

[Major_PK]

does this actually work, has anyone tried it cos i miss generals like

 

[Cerridwen]

iv seen it work before, I personally dont need to use it as im using the FX generation of amd [FX-60] which seems to handle it better. This basicly just sets the affinity before the application launches. The best idea is to use virtual pc 2004 and use it there. this if now free from microsoft. if you have any issues in aquiring this tool speak to me in either irc or pm and i shall give you a copy

 

[Major_PK]

neva got round to trying this..... c&c3 is just around the corner, but im vista ult 64bit now so it prob wont work lol