Macbook curiosity and crash

[cphcity 0]

Hi!

I have Macbook 2ghz, coreduo1 with 2gigabytes of ram. I am playing SC4 under bootcamp in XP, as it runs better than in OSX, at least on my computer. But it crashes randomly, like once every 4 hour or so? hmm, have any of you tried this random crashing on a Macbook? It  seems it is when the computer is under heavy workload like zoom in or out or flying over at skyline.

Another thing. It' does not run as smooth as i would have thought on a Macbook, even with shadows and clouds of, and almost everything else set to middle or low, except for textures set to high.  It's is indeed playable and enjoyable though.  But maybe it's just the integrated crab graphics GMA950? But then it could be something else. So i pressed the "apple button(option)" and jumped to the desktop and checked ram and cpu usage in the task manager.  The cpu was running pretty high on constant 60%. But SC4 was only using 255mb's of ram?! I checked it several times, and it does not exceed 255mb's, that's a about 440mb's used with rest of the system in total when nothing else is running, leaving 1560 megabytes of ram unused in my scenarion with 2gb's! That seems not very perfect? Any suggestions?

[Zelgadis 638]

Well, I don't have solutions, but I'll throw my hat in here nonetheless.

1) Random crashing: Doesn't Windows do that anyway? I've heard that from PC users about SC4.

2) Gameplay: Sounds to me like a non-universal binary problem. Aspyr's fix for the Intel chips is in beta now, as far as I know. If you're still running the original version, it probably doesn't like the Intel chips. It was originally built for a G4, I think.

ISF

[screamingman12 30]

Sounds like bootcamp, I have heard some not-so-decent reveiws about it. It's pretty much an emulator, crashing is what is to be expected.

[Kakaze 0]

Bootcamp is *not* an emulator. BootCamp, the software, is a GUI to a nondestructive partitioning tool available on Intel Macs and a collection of drivers for Mac specific hardware bundled in a package. You can install Windows on a Mac perfectly fine without BootCamp but BootCamp allows you to do it without formatting your drive and it gives you all the drivers needed to run Windows at it's full capacity.

If SC4 isn't running well under Windows on a MacBook it's most likely the system RAM or the crap integrated graphics. To the OP: I suggest finding a bootable copy of Memtest and running that for a few hours to see if your memory is working right. If it is then it's most likely that SC4 doesn't play nicely with the integrated graphics, in which case you just have to remember to save often. I know it goes without saying but make sure you have the latest patches for SC4 as well, the latest patches for Windows, and the latest version of the BootCamp drivers.

As far as memory use, I seem to remember when I was on Windows that SC4 used very little memory as well as the majority of the game is going to be dumped directly into video memory most likely. High CPU use is expected, however.

[cphcity 0]

Thanks for the answers. I will try to run memtest and update my system.

[Will Wright 0]

To start off: i'm not really Will Wright

I have the same exact problem, except I have an Intel GMA 950 running on Windows Vista

I'm gonna try to run SC4 on software rendering (even though I don't know what that does)

[cphcity 0]

Hi Will. I have tried that software render thing, but it makes no difference on my computer. One thing that can boost the speed a bit seems to be switching to 16bit colors, not in the actual game (because that makes no difference), but in the gma950 settings before you launch the game.

Another tip is to make a desktop SC4 desktop shortcut and click properties, then add:

 -r1280x800x32 -CustomResolution:enabled -intro:off

to the shortcut. Then the game will play in widescreen, and without intro.

Regarding the other Ram, smoothness and crash problems i am yet to find a solution...

[cphcity 0]

I could have figured this out earlier but:

I patched SC4 with the latest update from their site, and i updated the intel GMA950 driver.

Now the game runs quite a bit faster and i have not experienced any crashes yet either.