Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Rafid

The Visual Studio "dumpbin.exe" tool says WITPAE is not large address aware (LAA) - tested beta v1.7.11.159, but I doubt it is different for any other version.

For an executable to be LAA two requirements need to be met:

1. A certain bit in the executable needs to be set to tell Windows that the executable is LAA. This can easily be set during compiling (by Michael) or actually edited by anyone afterwards (see e.g. https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556/). This is the easy part.
2. The program and all third party libraries it accesses need to use full 32 bit pointers and not only 31 bit with assuming the first bit is 0 when accessing the memory (some programs temporarily use this bit to store other information). This is tough to ensure since it basically requires a full code review, but most late 32-bit era codes seem to adhere to this.

If you want, you can use the tool in the above link to set the LAA bit in the executable. This will get the same result Michael can get without putting in a crazy amount of work. According to forums, people have made good experiences with it (it definitely worked for me the two times I tried it). In the best case you have working LAA version of AE afterwards, in the worst case (if 2. is not ensured) you get game crashes and then even Michael won't be able to do it within a reasonable amount of work.

In any case making a program LAA has only advantages if the game used to crash after hitting 2GB of used memory (I've never seen this in AE) or if it used to slow down due to memory restrictions, but this would require a self-imposed sophisticated memory management - I highly doubt AE has. So you can set the LAA bit yourself, but I wouldn't expect much from it. You might try if the linked tool helps with your other game of course.