Limiting memory for MM9

Hartmut Figge · Post by **Hartmut Figge** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 4:45 pm

Greetings,

Might & Magic IX had even problems on my old Win98SE, except if i were
running special Nvidia drivers. So i wasn't surprised that i had similar
problems on wine.

Now, with nvidia-drivers 180.42, i have made a new try on wine 1.1.17
and it seems to run fine. But there is a problem.

Switching from the game to e.g. inventory using the key i takes a very
long time, about 50 seconds. Because this has to be done often this is
quite annoying.

The reason for this long time might be, that mm9 thinks, that there is
not enough memory. Look at this screenshot from the setup.

http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/setup.jpg (73 KB)

mm9 wants at least 64KB und finds only 2 GB. *g*

So, is there a way, wine can fake a reasonable amount of memory seen by mm9?

Hartmut

jeffz · Post by **jeffz** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 5:08 pm

Hartmut Figge wrote:Greetings,

Might & Magic IX had even problems on my old Win98SE, except if i were
running special Nvidia drivers. So i wasn't surprised that i had similar
problems on wine.

Now, with nvidia-drivers 180.42, i have made a new try on wine 1.1.17
and it seems to run fine. But there is a problem.

Switching from the game to e.g. inventory using the key i takes a very
long time, about 50 seconds. Because this has to be done often this is
quite annoying.

The reason for this long time might be, that mm9 thinks, that there is
not enough memory. Look at this screenshot from the setup.

http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/setup.jpg (73 KB)

mm9 wants at least 64KB und finds only 2 GB. *g*

So, is there a way, wine can fake a reasonable amount of memory seen by mm9?

Hartmut

I think you have misdiagnosed the problem, the issue you see in the setup is most likely unrelated. There is no reason to assume nvidia is the problem either.

If the inventory delay is also accompanied by high cpu, you should use oprofile to see where the time is being spent to find out what the real cause of the problem is. Compile wine with debugging symbols and check the oprofile website for examples.

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 5:54 pm

On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 17:08 -0500, jeffz wrote:

[snippage]

If the inventory delay is also accompanied by high cpu, you should use
oprofile to see where the time is being spent to find out what the
real cause of the problem is. Compile wine with debugging symbols
and check the oprofile website for examples.

Another way to see what might be hogging CPU is simply to start another
Linux terminal window and run 'top' in it.

Top shows the busiest processes in the machine with the most busy at the
top of the list. Once that's running you start MM9 as usual. Keep an eye
on top's display while MM9 runs and during the long pause 'top' should
show you what's responsible.

Martin

Hartmut Figge · Post by **Hartmut Figge** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 6:38 pm

Martin Gregorie:

Another way to see what might be hogging CPU is simply to start another
Linux terminal window and run 'top' in it.

I find that htop shows more information and i was just taking some
related screenshots.

First for comparison one for the load on a running mm8, without delays.
http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/m ... g_load.png (71 KB)

Next one of the start of mm9
http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/mm9_running.jpg (124 KB)

for which the load is
http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/m ... g_load.png (76 KB)

By the way, running mm9 shows no problems so far besides the one with
switching from the gameplay to a game menu.

Now to the switching. This time with esc to the main menu. Taken with
import from a xterm on workspace 6, visiting workspace 2 with the
running htop and then workspace 1 withe the running mm9.

http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/mm9_switching.jpg (177 KB)
Hm, i should have taken a .png for this instead of a .jpg.

No sign of mm9 is shown. Instead part of workspace 2 appears in the
window of mm9.

The load during the switching:
http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/m ... g_load.png (76 KB)

And finally the result of the switching:
http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/m ... tching.jpg (179 KB)

Using this menu is quick. No delays. Until i click on 'Spiele Laden'
which means 'Load Game'.

This takes the aforementioned 50 seconds. But, after starting mm9, the
first 'Load Games' was quick. Hm.

Hartmut

Hartmut Figge · Post by **Hartmut Figge** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 7:20 pm

Hartmut Figge:

This takes the aforementioned 50 seconds. But, after starting mm9, the
first 'Load Games' was quick. Hm.

Here is the solution.
http://telp.org/mm9/tavern/anyboard/posts/39819.html

Hartmut

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 7:40 pm

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 00:37 +0100, Hartmut Figge wrote:

Martin Gregorie:

Another way to see what might be hogging CPU is simply to start another
Linux terminal window and run 'top' in it.
I find that htop shows more information and i was just taking some
related screenshots.

Nonetheless, can you do it again, please, this time with top rather than
htop. It would be useful to see a more detailed breakdown of CPU, Memory
and Swap usage - top shows the detail rather than summarising 16
measurements as four bar graphs. It would be nice to know how much, if
any, of the CPU is being used by the system as opposed to one lithtech
thread.

Other questions:
- did you notice much disk activity while the switch was happening?

- how fast are your CPUs?

Martin

Hartmut Figge · Post by **Hartmut Figge** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 8:07 pm

Martin Gregorie:

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 00:37 +0100, Hartmut Figge wrote:

I find that htop shows more information and i was just taking some
related screenshots.
Nonetheless, can you do it again, please, this time with top rather than
htop. It would be useful to see a more detailed breakdown of CPU, Memory
and Swap usage - top shows the detail rather than summarising 16
measurements as four bar graphs.

Is it still necessary?
http://telp.org/mm9/tavern/anyboard/posts/39819.html shows the reason
for the delays und offers also a patch for mm9.

By the way, i wanted to thank the author, wrote a comment and was banned
from the forum. Seems that i should not have cited some of the message. *g*

http://www.triffids.de/pub/screenshot/telp.jpg (232 KB)

But citing is essential when replying. So i copied part of the message,
formated it, put '>' on the right places, wrote my answer, also nicely
formated - but the result seems to be an ugly mess. Puh.

I'm used to newsgroups and not to forums. *g*

Other questions:
- did you notice much disk activity while the switch was happening?

No. It seems to be an issue between DirectX 9 and DirectX 7.

- how fast are your CPUs?

model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz
stepping : 11
cpu MHz : 2667.000
cache size : 4096 KB

MemTotal: 3633756 kB

Hartmut

Das Letzte Einhorn · Post by **Das Letzte Einhorn** » Fri Mar 27, 2009 8:39 am

Do you still have the delay issues? I wrote this test for MM9: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... n&iId=7586, and in my case the game runs almost flawlessly. If you followed the same guidelines, I would be curious to see what goes wrong with your game.

Hartmut Figge · Post by **Hartmut Figge** » Fri Mar 27, 2009 3:15 pm

Das Letzte Einhorn:

Do you still have the delay issues? I wrote this test for MM9:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... n&iId=7586,
and in my case the game runs almost flawlessly. If you followed the
same guidelines, I would be curious to see what goes wrong with your
game.

After i finally had looked into the AppDB i had found your message which
pointed to the solution at
http://telp.org/mm9/tavern/anyboard/posts/39819.html

For the 1.3 patch, i couldn't find one and am assuming, that i run the
german 1.2 according to liesmich.txt. I can not the see the version of
the game in the game itself.

Now mm9 is running fine except of some crashes, not reproducible but
often occuring when entering a new region. I haven't copied the related
message in the xterm, but it was something like this:

Xlib: async error with unexpected value

That was with mm9 set for Windows XP. Now i have changed the setting to
Windows 98 and no crash so far. But on the other hand, this change was
not long ago. Time will show.

Hartmut

Hartmut Figge · Post by **Hartmut Figge** » Fri Mar 27, 2009 3:59 pm

Hartmut Figge:

Now i have changed the setting to Windows 98 and no crash so far. But
on the other hand, this change was not long ago. Time will show.

And so it was.
| Xlib: unexpected async reply (sequence 0x439)!

Occurred after the 4-th pressing of F9 to reload a quicksaved game. If
you wish to inspect some bones and your character is getting ill, well,
F9 exists. *g*

As i have seen just now wine 1.1.18 is out. I expect an ebuild for my
Gentoo tomorrow. Perhaps ...

Hartmut

Das Letzte Einhorn · Post by **Das Letzte Einhorn** » Fri Mar 27, 2009 10:53 pm

The game has very poor coding unfortunately, so I really recommend getting the 1.3 patch to remove as many issues from the game as possible. I do not know however if the patch will respect your localized language version: http://telp.org/mm9/patches/patches.html. Even with the patch the game still freezes occasionally, so I recommend saving as often as you can, with different files.

Hartmut Figge · Post by **Hartmut Figge** » Sat Mar 28, 2009 2:16 am

Das Letzte Einhorn:

The game has very poor coding unfortunately, so I really recommend
getting the 1.3 patch to remove as many issues from the game as
possible.

Sounds reasonable.

I do not know however if the patch will respect your
localized language version: http://telp.org/mm9/patches/patches.html.

First i had to copy mm9german.exe to mm9.exe before the patch could be
applied. Some files were modified and some were skipped.

Of course i have a backup. *g*

Even with the patch the game still freezes occasionally, so I
recommend saving as often as you can, with different files.

Yes, that's what i have done already in the past. Using F5 for quicksave
often and occasionally a real save.

Thanks for the link.

Hartmut