A Report: Win Vista, Laptops, IL-2 1946, SFP1/WoV/WoE &

[UberDemon]

A Report: Win Vista, Laptops, IL-2 1946, SFP1/WoV/WoE & UQMG

So I decided it was time to invest on a new Laptop, since my old laptop was falling apart, for real.

All I could find was Windows Vista laptops, so I decided to give it a go, and went for a Toshiba Satellite w/ Win Vista Home Premium, Intel Core 2 Duo (1.73GHz), 2GB RAM, 200GB HDD. The graphics is Mobile Intel 945GM integrated video with up to 224MB shared memory. The screen is a 16:10 ratio 15.4”diagonal widescreen LCD.

The GUI is very nice, I must say, but I was interested on the inner-workings. There is so much protection in the OS that sometimes it gets a bit irritating, and I found myself not being able to do simple stuff like overwriting files, installing programs, unzipping archives, etc. EVEN as an Administrator of my own machine! Well it is all possible, you just gotta find out…

My reasoning for the laptop was definitely not gaming, but I figured I’d give it a whirl anyway. So here are some tips and some surprising results…

IL-2 1946
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So… what about IL-2 1946? I actually own two copies of IL-2 1946, because my first purchase took so long, I bought another one that got to my home sooner… then I ended up w/ 2 copies. Oh well.

The combo DVD/DVDR/CDR/etc… of course had problems installing, so I had to manually double-click the file “a.exe” in the DVD installation disk and it installed perfectly.

The program loaded without a hitch… the only problem is that IL-2 1946 does not have widescreen settings, as far as I can tell, so unless you want to view a bunch of fat planes, you have to use Window setting…

The funny thing is that even with all the other processes running, including McAfee, the performance was actually very good if not slightly better than my desktop, which is a 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, 256MB DDR ATI 9xxx Radeon, running on a clean install of XP with an AV, Internet protection suite. With an update from UbiSoft to support widescreen, this would be money, so to speak… I am pleased that I may be able to play on the road, so that is a bonus to me.

UQMG
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I use UQMG (UberQuick Mission Generator), of course, I wrote it… but installing it and making it work was troublesome.

Here is the deal. I told you about the overly protective nature of Windows Vista. In the Security Center in the Control Panel, there is an additional setting called “User Account Control”, and if you don’t disable it, you will not be able to do things like, overwriting or deleting an executable file, which is essential for updates to low-end applications such as mine, even if you are a SUPER-ULTRA-GOD-MODE-Administrator… that was so frustrating until I disabled it.

Basically I installed it, and it would not let me run the install part of running UQMG the first time, which unzips the “fb100.exe” which contains all the essential config files of UQMG. At first I had to right click the file and select “Run as Administrator”, which is a nice feature, but still… the user should not have to worry about that…

Then I installed the update to UQMG from my site at http://www.uberdemon.com... And it would simply not allow me… that is until I found out about the “User Account Control”.

So the lesson here is that if you want to install UQMG and any upgrades, you gotta disable UAC first… and if you really want it, then enable it after you are done with install… and for any future updates you will have to do the same.

Other than that, UQMG works as advertised in Windows Vista as well.


Strike Fighters Project 1 (SFP1) / Wings Over Vietnam (WoV)/ Wings Over Europe (WoE)
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This Thirdwire series is my new favorite, outside of Star Wars Battlefront II and the Battlefield 2 series.

Well, I installed WOV first, then updated it, then installed WOE, which can automatically import the planes and map of WOV into it… then I manually installed the 2 extra planes from SFP1 and its desert map plus campaign into it as well… Then all patches, etc…

Things worked OK before the patch, even though the patch adds an additional widescreen setting… after installing it, BAM, no more sim… It kept asking for a file called “d3dx9_30.dll” when entering a mission… so I thought DirectX 10 does not include all the files for programs that were written to work with DX9.

I went back and installed DirectX 9.0c from the WOE CD just to see what happened… and a bunch of files ended up being installed, without messing up DX10. I ran the program, and I got the same error… frustration.

So I found a few similarly named files in the C:\Windows\System32 directory, namely, “d3dx9_24.dll” to “d3dx9_29.dll”. No “30” though… so I tried to be sneaky and copied “d3dx9_29.dll” into “d3dx9_30.dll” just for kicks…

I re-started WOE, and was able to play on the 16:10 video setting with maximum settings, and it runs flawlessly, better than in my desktop, with better graphics…

There you go… I hope this was useful.

[UberDemon]

I tried 1280x800x32 by manually changing config.ini and it worked, but that was too much... so... even better, I found a setting in the Intel Video which allows a Force Aspect Ratio, it allows selecting the best performance setting without having to worry about a stretched screen... so I can have 1024x768x32 working very well and with very good graphics in a laptop I never thought I'd get IL-2 working... again a bonus.

Also Thirdwire has a link to MS that updates the DirectX in a better way. All good then.