Make an application think I only have 2GB of RAM?

[General Crespin]

G'morning all,

I have VU 64-bit with 4GB of RAM.

Is there anything I can do on the software side to make applications think I have less than 4GB of RAM? I'm thinking of Empire at War: Forces of Corruption and Act of War: High Treason, both of which will not run with 4GB of RAM. I know I could go into the BIOS and make the computer think I only have 3GB, but that rather defeats the purpose of having 4GB.

I poked around with the MS Application Compatibility Toolkit v5 but I didn't see anything that looked useful. Any chance I'm wrong?

Thank you!

 

[Rebel44]

Use Windows 98 compatibility mode.

 

[Joe Average]

I''m sorry, but let me see if I get this straight: you've got two games that won't run at all because you've got 4GB of RAM, right? Wow... that's a first for me in decades of working with PCs. Most of the time - in fact every time since I started working with PCs till this moment when I just read the OP - games are starving for it, or PCs are, so this is quite an oddball twist.

I really don't have a solution aside from maybe changing the msconfig settings to allow the OS to "see" only a given amount of RAM you specify; it's something we've been able to do with Windows since NT4 iirc.

Start - Run - msconfig, click the BOOT.INI tab, then click Advanced Options... and you should see this:

Check the /MAXMEM= box, type 2048 in it and then close out the options with Apply and OK as required. It'll tell you to reboot to make it go into effect, and on the next boot - if you do it right then and there - Windows will come up and never "see" more than the 2GB of RAM you specified (2048 MB). Also, the System Configuration tool will pop up after each boot reminding you that you've altered the default boot.ini, and it'll continue to pop up from that point on unless you change the settings back to "normal" by unchecking that box.

It's worth a shot, I suppose. Can't believe games won't run because of too much RAM, that's truly bizarre.

 

[Rebel44]

..........................................
It's worth a shot, I suppose. Can't believe games won't run because of too much RAM, that's truly bizarre.

I know several old (~10 years) games which have this problem. Your solution is too complicated - running those games in Win 98 compatibility mode is IMO much easier.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Wow... that's a first for me in decades of working with PCs.

It happens....over the years I've run across quite a few apps (usually legacy apps) which freak out at too much RAM. Heck..even too fast of a processor (hence tweaking tools such as SloMo). Even going back to DOS based apps and conventional memory (ahh the good old days of massaging config.sys)

 

[General Crespin]

Win98 compatibility mode didn't work, so I'll try out Joe Average's tip.

I hope it's not from being 64-bit.