Three years ago the Sid Meier’s Railroads community over at Hooked on Railroads found that the 3GB enabler fixed crashing to desktop for Sid Meier’s Railroads. Apparently we were not alone and a number of games from that era, ~2006, suffered and so far I have seen versions of the 3GB enabler edited for Supreme commander, Stalker, Battlefield 2142 and Oblivion. Recently I edited the 3Gb enabler to work with Sid Meier’s Railroads, before this Sid Meier’s Railroads players had to do weird things like renaming the “.exe”
No more! Now any the 3GB Enabler will work with any program. In fact it is not even limited to “.exe”s. With that said I have no clue what will happen if you edit a none exe. Read on for the readme and the download.
README:
Later Edited by Warll.Dressler to add arbitrary program selection, changed many minor portions of text to clarify and improve readibility
Editted by Chimera for Oblivian
Originally by unknown source for S.T.A.L.K.E.R CTD issues.****** VERY IMPORTANT: IF YOU ARE USING AN x64 OPERATING SYSTEM:
****** SKIP THE “DIRECTIONS” SECTION.Introduction:
This is for intermediate to advanced Windows users.
Follow the instructions carefully…the risk is minimal, as long as you backup a copy of your original executable, aka “program” aka file ending in “.exe”.This will enable an executable, aka “program” aka file ending in .exe, to use over 2GB of memory in the application space.
It uses conventional tools using a batch file so everyone can see nothing suspicious goes on.
This tool will automatically set the header in said .exe so that it can address more than 2GB memory.
Normally XP will only address up to 2GB memory for applications and 2Gb for the kernel.
If we add a boot.ini switch /3GB, then XP is allowed to address up to 3GB for applications.
But unfortunately only applications that are enabled with “IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE” header can utilize more than 2GB of the space.I highly recommend you look at some official information here at microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx______________________________________________
Directions:
First you need to tell XP/Vista that it can use more than 2GB of RAM for applications.
Manually edit your boot.ini file by adding ” /3GB /Userva=2900″ to your boot.ini (no quotes).
Your boot.ini is normally read only and you will need to change that temporarily while you edit it.
To do this, right-click the file and untick “Read Only”. After editing the file, restore the Read-only status.
To Edit it manually you can find it on the root of your system drive or
go to system properties/advanced tab, settings under ‘startup and recovery’ section, then hit edit.Mine looks like: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Windows XP Professional” /FASTDETECT /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /3GB /Userva=2900
Yours maybe different, the only thing you should change is add ” /3GB /Userva=2900″.
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Instructions for using the 3GB Enabler tool:
*** Important: First make a backup of the original “.exe”. there are any number of ways to do this, the simpliest is to make a copy of the “.exe” and store said copy some place safe or to keep a copy in the same folder under a diferent name. ***
*** Without a backup of the original “.exe” you might have troubles updating the program in the future due to copy protection schemes ***The tool will add the “LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE” header for you to your executable.
Make sure a copy of the program is located in the same folder that the batch file is going to be ran from.
Doubleclick startme.bat then the menu walks you through.
1) Type the full name of the program including the “.exe” portion
2) Press Enter
3) Hit the A key to add the large address header.
4) Press any key to continue.
5) When back at main menu hit ‘V’ to output the headers in text so you can see the values.
6) Now you can check to see if it is enabled. Scroll to the top and look for section “FILE HEADER VALUES”. Look for a line in that section that says “Application can handle large (>2GB) addresses”. It’s the tenth line down in that section. If you see that line then the executable is now enabled for >2GB, you are done.
7) Copy the enabled “.exe” back to the correct folder.
8) To avoid any strange issues with future patches, I suggest you rename your 3GB capable “.exe” to something else like “Fubar3GB.exe”, then make a shortcut to it on your desktop. In the meanwhile, keep the original where it belongs and you will avoid any possible patching or online issues.At anytime if you want to remove the large address header then you can restore you original backed up exe or use the app and use the Remove function and it will remove the header. Once you run (R) to remove the header you have the original exe back, the MD5 hashes will match.
No strange side effects have been witnessed, but gladly I can play some big games now.
DOWNLOAD:
