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UCyborg

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Posts posted by UCyborg

  1. Oh well, I guess a reboot might inevitable, even though it's just a workaround. I found this text:

    Quote

    Private Bytes refers to the amount of Page file space that is allocated to the process (not necessarily used) in the event that the process's private memory footprint is completely paged out to swap. most of the time, the process is not entirely (or at all) page-file resident, so that's why private bytes appears to have "room" for further allocation. It is not however the case.

    Private bytes however only refers to the processes private memory, so this value may not reflect shared resources (even if the shared resource is only used by this process at present).

    If I sort processes by Private bytes value in Process Hacker, when it comes to background processes, Windows Update service scores the top place with 148,45 MB. Now that's a waste considering my group policy setting for keeping automatic updates disabled. I suspect that can't be all.

  2. 14 hours ago, win32 said:

    it almost runs, but it doesn't due to the missing API import CreateEventExA. If you change it to CreateEventA, it runs.

    That can't work without also modifying the calling code as the signatures of the two APIs are incompatible.

    Or having a simple wrapper function in a proxy DLL or similar that would properly pass the parameters to CreateEventA, which could look like:

    HANDLE CreateEventExA(LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpEventAttributes, LPCSTR lpName, DWORD dwFlags, DWORD dwDesiredAccess)
    {
    	return CreateEventA(lpEventAttributes, dwFlags & CREATE_EVENT_MANUAL_RESET, dwFlags & CREATE_EVENT_INITIAL_SET, lpName);
    }

    I don't know if there would be issues or not due to ignoring the access rights that the last parameter of CreateEventExA deals with.

    15 hours ago, win32 said:

    It crashes for me when trying to render, but I believe that is due to my GPU not supporting OpenGL 3.3, not because of win2k.

    Should show the message box like this (source):

    OiLEk.jpg

  3. WPA doesn't show any stack under CM16 tag, just n/a.

    10 MB per day may not be the most exact number though. Paged pool at 807 MB now after 97 days. If I remember correctly, non-paged pool starts at about 110 MB - 130 MB (now at about 260 MB).

  4. If I don't fully shut down Windows every day, I notice in Task Manager that the Paged pool under Memory on Performance tab increases by approximately 10 MB every day. It was similar on Windows 8.1 (a bit worse actually) and just logging off didn't clear it up. I don't know about Windows 7 and earlier because I haven't kept them up for more than a day.

    PC is hibernated at night (and most of the day actually, I mostly use it in the evening).

    I got some results from poolmon.exe - was following the instructions I found on superuser. So I don't find CM16 tag in any of the driver files, so it must be Windows (ntoskrnl.exe? - findstr did pick it up when scanning System32 folder).

    tKwB3sm.png

    Ntfx tag scores the top place when it comes to non-paged memory, this one belongs ntfs.sys - MS driver dealing with NTFS file system I suppose. Non-paged memory pool is increasing over time as well, just at the slower pace.

    Is the thing just buggy or could there be something else causing the issue?

  5. Regarding Mafia, it's interesting that only those specific missions are somehow bugged. With older games in general, it's common that if they have issues with higher frame-rates, the entire world / physics simulation is bugged.

    Interstate '76 for instance doesn't only have the issue with higher frame rates, but the entire world simulation almost comes to a stop if the operating system has been running for too long. It converts 32-bit unsigned integer representing system uptime in milliseconds (from GetTickCount function) to seconds and stores it in float, which doesn't have space left for the part after decimal point after several days. So it seems when it happens, the state is only updated every second. Managed to fix that along with some other problems with it and published a patch for it.

    Since you mentioned NFS: Porsche 2000, the unofficial patch that exists for it is quite extensive, same for some other older Need or Speed games.

    13 hours ago, Tommy said:

    I'm also not sure about low settings either. But I believe you can dial it down quite a bit. When I open up setup.exe, it looks like the lowest resolution is 640x480 and I'm not sure if compressed or low detail graphics would yield better results.

    I usually just lowered the resolution on that old computer in games, I think I left Mafia at something higher than 640x480 though. That alone helped a lot with the performance.

    Only lowering resolution still leaves details in place, but makes things pixelated on LCD screens while settings dealing with texture quality can take a direct toll on the quality of the original assets.

    13 hours ago, Tommy said:

    My edited Mafia game has Freeride which not only has a toned down light setting so it's not so yellow/orangish (sunny as hell) tint to it, but you're also accompanied by Paulie, Sam, and Don Salieri himself. All have Colt 1911s except Salieri who is still wielding his Smith and Wesson Magnum (with almost unlimited ammo, of course). Only downfall is you can only drive four door cars and if you don't start with a four door car, they'll start at the bar and have to run to you, otherwise you all start in the car. But something weird is I noticed in certain places, they get stuck and refuse to walk. This usually occurs in Oakhill or a few other random, off the beaten path places. They'll just stand there and they will only pivot in place but you could literally go to the North Pole, they will not follow you unless you manage to knock them out of place that is preventing them from walking. All these years later, I still haven't figured out why this happens.

    Maybe the world data contains pathways that they follow and they won't move in places where pathways are missing.

    On 4/27/2019 at 7:13 PM, Tommy said:

    I did noticed that when you first launched into your save file that it can seem a bit choppy for a second or two, but that could be driver related as well.

    Right, back to Mafia II. Do you notice this also if you alt-tab out and back in? I've got a hitch like something's not fully loaded yet when you load the saved game. And if you tab out, it must be restored when going back in.

    And what little I've read about programming with Direct3D, some care must be taken when handling such events.

  6. On 3/3/2020 at 6:12 AM, Tommy said:

    But I'm very curious to know which tracks were cut in Mafia II's Director's Cut.

    Here's a list of changed files between original and GOG release (source):

    sds/music/Radio/40/empire/buttons_and_bows.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/40/classic/good_little_bad_little_you.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/40/empire/therell_be_a_hot_time_in_the.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/40/classic/youre_driving_me_crazy_dr.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/40/empire/sing_sing_sing_bg.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/classic/che_la_luna.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/40/empire/it_dont_mean_a_thing_if_it_a.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/classic/oh_marie.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/classic/speech/0_14_3_51_0191.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/classic/speech/0_15_3_06_0196.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/classic/makin_whoopee_dd.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/classic/speech/0_10_3_07_0181.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/classic/aint_that_a_kick_in_the_head.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/delta/aint_that_a_shame.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/delta/i_put_a_spell_on_you.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/empire/why_do_fools_fall_in_love.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/classic/when_youre_smiling.fsb
    sds/music/Radio/50/empire/speech/1_11_1_50_0161.fsb
    sds_en/script_sounds/m06_sounds_4.sds
    sds_en/script_sounds/m06_sounds_4b.sds
    sds/music/Menu/Credits_theme_music.fsb

    I'm curious about Mafia I on 500 MHz CPU because the first computer I used that could do 3D games had 2 GHz Intel Celeron (I think its codename is Northwood) and an entry-level NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440. Frame-rate drop was quite noticeable at night, I guess due to the lighting. Even on later hardware, it can be felt that rendering city at night is more resource intensive than during daytime.

    Heh, I don't think I tried running it on low settings back then.

    Plus, there are two missions in Free Ride Extreme (Exploding Celeste and Bridge Bombing Zeppelin) that are impossible to complete unless you cap the game's frame rate to about 20 FPS. That made me think it didn't run too well for at least some of the developers and whoever tested those missions.

    On 3/3/2020 at 6:12 AM, Tommy said:

    Heck, many say that Mafia II needs a remaster. Call me old fashion but I thought Mafia II was BEAUTIFUL as it was and a huge improvement over the original Mafia game.

    Games already looked pretty detailed in general were back then if you ask me. Even if you do remaster such a game, I don't think the difference would be as huge compared to if you go and remaster a game from 1995. Either way, it's possible to replace textures in both games.

  7. This article says Storage Sense cleans dated Windows update temporary files, so maybe there's a certain age threshold in place.

    You might still be able to run the cleaner from Settings app, just don't go through Storage Sense, rather click on Temporary files right after you open the Storage category, assuming whatever Windows 10 version you're dealing with has that (older versions don't). That should behave the same way as Disk Cleanup application.

    So with older versions, there's no built-in alternative to the good ol' Disk Cleanup application.

    With newer versions, things are improved in the Settings app, but, running the old Disk Cleanup still gives a better idea about what it's able to clean up. I'd have to test to be 100% certain, but it's possible that the Settings app just hides the items where there isn't anything to clean.

  8. Mafia II Director's Cut on GOG.com is missing some music that's there in the initial release.

    PhysXLoader.dll should probably be deleted from the game folder (pc subfolder, to be precise). It gets installed with other PhysX DLLs when you install PhysX so it's kinda redundant and will likely result in unintended mixing of PhysX DLLs of various ages (which could cause problems).

    I noticed even newer games may have minimum requirements above what's needed to make it playable. I've no idea how Mafia I runs on 500 MHz CPU. Might be OK with the drawing distance of 5 meters. :P

  9. SteamCMD still seems to work on Windows XP x64. It doesn't replace regular Steam client for playing games though, there's only download/update functionality.

    It occasionally complains about some certificate check failure while downloading. I haven't updated system certificates, maybe that would fix it.

  10. It's possible to modify it with msstyleEditor. Open the theme's .msstyles file, then navigate to AeroWizard->TITLEBAR. On the right pane, make sure TEXTGLOWSIZE is set to 12 and GLOWINTENSITY is set to 250 - this restores the Windows 7 glow effect.

    You can also change the text color (TEXTCOLOR), it can be different depending on whether the window is active or not.

    It's possible to change the font as well (under AeroWizardStyle), but I'm not sure whether msstyleEditor can do it. I'm looking at the options in the older version of it, which only allows setting predefined values.

    With Windows Style Builder, you get the full dialog allowing for font selection, size etc.

  11. 2 hours ago, sonyu said:

    This is not Windows 10. Check this:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

    I was talking about official release builds starting with 2nd paragraph.

    2 hours ago, sonyu said:

    I can't answer to this: "I find the fact that you have to run this build with the wrong date alone problematic." since it is not allowed in forum rules.

    Exactly, running a pre-release build isn't a viable option for obvious reasons.

  12. I find the fact that you have to run this build with the wrong date alone problematic.

    Win10 in general does take forever to load initially on HDDs, that's for sure. It doesn't seem like they have any plans to address this. Even though the OS already hibernates by default when you use shut down option, it still takes some time to log back on after turning the machine on.

    Recently, I've been skipping the logging off part and just put it straight into hibernation. That helps a lot with having it ready ASAP after turning it on.

    Also, what exactly does turning off Superfetch service accomplish? It doesn't seem to turn off the whole standby memory functionality.

  13. Aero Glass can't function 100% correctly without having accurate information about Desktop Window Manager's internals (exception being the Windows versions from the time of Aero Glass release), so in that case, it'll complain unless symbol files for the actual versions of dwmcore.dll and uDWM.dll libraries are present. Also the symbol file for ApllicationFrame.dll is needed for the extra functionality of restoring classic window frames of UWP apps.

    One way to get them is via a script such as this one. The prerequisite is installed Debugging Tools for Windows, which you can install by running Windows SDK installer.

    Another is using this PDB Downloader tool. You must browse to the DLL files in C:\Windows\System32 and set save path to C:\AeroGlass\symbols.

    If you donate to this project, generate donation.key file for your machine and put it in C:\AeroGlass folder, Aero Glass downloads required symbol files on its own.

  14. Windows XP has the decency to not touch the partition if it was marked as hidden.

    But if you boot Windows 7 or really any OS past XP, and it encounters the partition with another hibernated Windows, which was marked as hidden (ID 0x17 instead of 0x7) prior to booting the other Windows OS, that other Windows OS (assuming it's newer than XP) will do something to it so when you wake-up the hibernated OS, it'll detect inconsistencies in the file system and bug you to reboot to run the chkdsk.

    Why does it do that? What's the point of having the hidden flag then? But give the partition some stupid ID and then it will leave it alone.

    Or maybe XP just considers the ID 0x17 as invalid and ignores it, making it seem nicer, while it might behave just like newer versions otherwise? Maybe they just compared the ID to 0x7 back then by testing for equality, rather than testing for both NTFS bit and the hidden bit and handling them both, with one practical difference in the case of hidden bit set being that the partition is not shown to the user and applications as the logical drive with assigned letter, but the OS still doing things behind the scenes as in the case of visible partition.

  15. It shouldn't be that bad as the OP describes due to an OS. Things render a bit faster on newer OS for me, one apparent example being HexGL game for instance which runs choppy on XP (x64) for me, even though ANGLE is disabled and NVIDIA's drivers are generally good at OpenGL. There's a difference in how fast a web pages appear, albeit not dramatic.

    The biggest performance killer on XP is running the browser on secondary screen. Rendering is normally off-loaded to GPU and DirectX on XP has an awful characteristic that when application's window in which it's used is moved to another screen makes some slow copying process going on constantly in the background, slowing everything down.

    Using Mozilla browsers, it's possible to hack xul.dll to call IDirect3D9::CreateDevice with a different adapter number, binding the browser to another non-primary display, so it will run fine on the one that was chosen (but not the others). With later OS (Vista+), it doesn't matter which display it's bound to, the parameter is only relevant for fullscreen mode.

    Maybe it would be possible to make it work right on XP with multi-mon setup using DirectX, but it might not be trivial task. There's a pref to use OpenGL (which doesn't have that problem) instead of DirectX, but it seems broken on Windows (crash). At very least, @roytam1 could add a workaround in form a pref setting to select adapter/display number passed to IDirect3D9::CreateDevice.

    On 2/6/2020 at 6:27 PM, win32 said:

    Vista with Platform Update and above also have DX11/D2D/DirectWrite for hardware acceleration IIRC, which NT5 lacks, except for Windows 2000 with the BWC-provided wineD3D DX10/11 module possibly. In fact the site in the OP's link seem to make use of the DX10/11-type acceleration as they crash the browsers on my workstation as a result of OpenGL calls being directed to nss3.dll (instead of opengl32.dll). So that may be the missing ingredient for NT5

    How did you come to the conclusion that OpenGL calls are made? Also, not sure how rendering calls could be made to the library dealing with cryptography and such things. That site doesn't use WebGL neither.

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