In x64 Windows, that should be all you need to do.

In x32 Windows, you also need to use the /3GB switch in Boot.ini. And you might also need to use the /Userva switch to fine tune the memory usage, especially if your video card has a lot of ram.

Keep in mind that there's a reason this flag is not enabled by default. The game may crash if you enable this. It depends on how sloppily it's coded. (Technically, it should work without any problems, but programmers often end up making assumptions about the system based on what *seems* to work. And if they assume anywhere that memory pointers stay below the 2gb point, all sorts of fun bugs can appear once you enable LAA.

So it's very possible that won't enable the LAA flag. It'd require a hell of a lot more testing (and possibly bug-fixing) on their part, which might be hard to justify this late in the game's lifecycle.

However, I can't see any reason why it shouldn't be legal for you to enable it yourself, although of course editing the .exe will probably cause the Impulse patcher/version checker to flip out.

Also, as said above, this only has an effect on 32-bit systems if you also use the /3GB switch (which, again, may cause instability in your drivers for the same reason. Most drivers aren't tested with that switch, because it's not commonly used.

So I'd recommend only doing this on a 64-bit system. (/LAA will then allow the app to use up to 4GB memory)

Just keep a copy of the original exe in a different location, and swap it back if you are checking for updates.

And I don't know about DA or Twilight, but enabling the flag in DL works just fine. I have not changed it since I reinstalled my system a couple months ago, but I had modded the exe and had been running it for about a year and a half with no problems.

The devs don't read every post.

Emailing support@stardock.com should get it to them.

I'm not talking of the same thing for both values :

-in the title, I talk about galciv2 executables which are currently 32bit (and I note that 64 bit recompiling is NOT necessary)

-in my post I note that I have XP64 myself but this suggestion ain't really centered on myself

on XP32 both the pro and media center editions allow to use the 3GB switch

in france there's a law against reverse-engineering, that's also the reason why "cracks", so to speak, are not legal

Freeman43, perhaps you should start a new thread about your problem.

And include more detail about what you were doing, how long you were in the game when the problem happened, and the entire text of the debug.err file for your particular game just after it crashed.

i did!

ho ok thanks for the explanation, I'm not used to working with pointers, well it seems to work either way but maybe I just got lucky

And I didn't know that the "EU software directive explicitely allows to modify a program to make it interoperable to your hardware"

Seems like if it's really applicable in france then it's a hole against those new laws that forbid going against integrated anti-piracy DRMs

Somehow I still doubt it would hold in court in France, more so with our "new" president...

It is very likely a modification would appear to function correctly, because a pointer subtraction (or a comparison of pointers) over the signed/unsigned boundary is extremely rare and can only occur if the program actually uses more than 2GB of memory. However, cannot be ruled out it happens. That means a piece of software could randomly crash on such an OS, which is why Microsoft has chosen an opt-in.

Linux on the other hand, does not offer an opt-in because the 3GB/1GB split is so terribly old that there exist no backwards compat issues. so if you code for Linux you'd better do your pointer calculations unsigned. The compiler warns to help.

well in fact, as I see it, it can't hurt at all in this case

why ? let's say for the sake of an example that game ZETA got modified with the LAA flag

case 1 : the game ZETA never goes beyond 2GB => this modification while completely uneeded won't hurt the well being of the game

case 2 : the game ZETA crosses 2GB and don't have any checks with signed boundary => ok all is fine, and we did well to allow the game to use more than 2GB or else the game would have crashed.

case 3 : the game ZETA crosses 2GB and have a check with signed boundary at some points => once the game is beyond 2GB, it can crash at any moment BUT if the game did not have the LAA flag it would have crashed anyway ...

so as I see it, the worst you can have is that this modification won't improve anything, that is either you crash because you got Out Of Memory

or you crash because the game checked a signed boundary ...

between a crash or a crash, I chose a crash

Joking aside, maybe one type of crash could be preferable over another like maybe one certain type could crash the whole computer rather than just the app.

unfortunately XP home is a rather limited edition of XP 32 bits

and as such (AFAIK) it doesn't support the /3GB switch necessary for the OS to handle memory amounts up to 3GB for a single process

(in other words, if you modify galciv2 to access more than 2GB, XP home will ignore the setting and allow only up to 2GB

the documentation on this subject is rather sparse (and most people don't realize that the switch itself is not enough and so say proudly "it works" while it does nothing at all) though :

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx (as one can see XP home is not written here.Media center edition too but XP media center is just an XP Pro with media center software)

ho and lastly putting it in your "boot.ini" file won't do any harm, it's just ignored..

for more general information there is interesting reads here : http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/06/01/423817.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08/05/208908.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/14/699521.aspx