Ummmm, I am on Admiral Kiernyc's team!

red lights go off in my head when I see this.

or more importantly, in what ungodly universe can your computer handle that many? and can you show me how to get there?

As opposed to..a double? Float? A linked list? A binary tree? "I'm making all game constants have up to seven significant digits!"

bigger, more important question: is there someway to streamline ram for this game? I think I've had a crash where I had more ships than the OS would handle.

yes, but I'm talking just streamlining, making the units take less than the 2gig spot than as of currently

keep in mind I'm using vista which practically doubles a program's ram usage. also having that 3gig switch would be nice

Ron you've never heard of vista's parade of Ram eating programs? it even doubles up the picture of an application so that it can go in and out (alt tabing) faster! that can easily suck up a good deal of ram for games like supcom.
that increased ram req falls under the 2 gig switch, so basically you just confirmed what I said.

they didnt do it for supcom!

the OS eats it up for them, but as relative to that limit its indistinguishable. the OS attatches those changes to the actual program, not doubling those programs on its own

the result, as obvious, is that page limit is drastically "lower".

no, what happens is the OS supplements the original program, except that all of those supplements fall under the 2gig data packet umbrella, so as far as anyone else is concerned it doubles the RAM the thing utilizes.

yes.

the problem with that is it consumes the package limit of 2gigs, games fold much faster.


then at least provide a quick and easy tool to let it happen if you've already made the adjustments, like me.

If they programmed it to be large address capable (which is just plain old fashioned good programming technique) then adding a large address aware "flag" to the exe file is actually quite doable -- go look at Supreme Commander, where an end-user created a "patch" file to make it flagged so!

Specifically, any time the game exceeded the use of 2GB of memory it would crash -- its a limitation of a 32 bit OS. The OS can only allocate 4GBs of memory "addresses", either to a given program or to the various hardware memory. As a result, you get the 4 GB "cap" on addressable memory, split between system RAM, video RAM, and any other hardware devices on the machine. Additionally, programs have a limit of 4 GBs of "memory spaces", and by default 2GBs of those go to OS stuff and the other 2 GBs go to the game. At the time this "standard" was devised, it made perfect sense -- no [i]way to use that much memory!. These days, its a problem, as we really could use the extra memory from moving the "partition" over a half-gig to a full gig, but bad programming on many kernel level things (aka drivers and the like) means that even on programs flagged large address aware (a flag created because if the programmers didn't program the software right, moving that "partition" over can cause it to break down) you run some risks with system stability.

With a 64 bit OS, the allocation limits were done away with entirely. (Edit: I used to have a link to a page or three on the subject, but I don't anymore, alas).