[ckawahara]

For those who do not visit TS, there is an interesting topic involving the expanded use of computer RAM with MSTS as well as other post year 2000 applications.

http://www.trainsim....emory-Or-Can-It

[markus_GE]

hey ckawahara, thanks for sharing this with us!

altough i am registered to TSdotcom, i would´ve overlooked that topic, but for running MSTS on a windows 7 64bit machine, this really makes sense!

[captain_bazza]

I downloaded the file for use with my XP SP3 4 GB system. I also used it for OR with minimal apparent affect so far, but it could be subtle. MSTS untested at the moment. (As suggested, I first backed up the MSTS train.exe file.)

Cheers Bazza

[captain_bazza]

I tried it in MSTS and it didn't appear to have done any harm.

This is what a little utility called Speccy says about my current RAM setup:

Quote

RAM
Memory slots
Total memory slots 4
Used memory slots 2
Free memory slots 2
Memory
Type DDR3
Size 4096 MBytes
Channels # Dual
CAS# Latency (CL) 9 clocks
RAS# to CAS# Delay (tRCD) 9 clocks
RAS# Precharge (tRP) 9 clocks
Cycle Time (tRAS) 24 clocks
Bank Cycle Time (tRC) 33 clocks
Command Rate (CR) 1T
Physical Memory
Memory Usage 25 %
Total Physical 3.25 GB
Available Physical 2.43 GB
Total Virtual 5.53 GB
Available Virtual 4.78 GB
SPD
Number Of SPD Modules 2
Slot #1
Slot #2

The two important lines are highlighted and italicised.

Cheers Bazza

[bennycdn]

I tried it,makes graphics more stable,hasn't effected the framerates much as mine were high.I tried it on one of my mini-routes while using the ReddingXL route which is graphic intense.Checked out speccy,a pretty usefull tool. Benny

[rdamurphy]

Wow, I seem to have caused quite a stir with my little forum post! Funny thing is, I built myself a new computer late last year, and because RAM was not only dirt-cheap, but had a great rebate on top of it, I put in 16G's of DDR3. I'm pretty sure that I've never even came close to even remotely using all of it, LOL!

I stumbled across the Large Array Aware thing while reading up on 64bit game vs 32bit game programming. Since I haven't done a lot of programming since my VB6.0 days, and only scratched the surface of .net when it first came out, I've had to do a lot of relearning. Poor Rob has to put up with my stupid questions a lot, lol...

So, I found the program, thought I would give it a try, and I was actually kind of wowed. Since, with 16G of RAM, I obviously never use the Windows swap-file, and the additional speed, it makes MSTS look almost as good as OR. <bites tongue> Smoothed it right out and certainly seemed to help. I use mini-routes, so I was able to compare and it did make a difference for me.

At any rate, I'm glad that it seems to have affected some people's enjoyment of the game in a positive manner.

BTW, Captain, it doesn't work well with WinXP, even 64 bit. I believe you have to add a command line switch to even get it to work, and it's rather buggy. WinXP didn't ship with the SYSWOW subsystem that comes with Vista and later...

Robert

[captain_bazza]

Any tiny gain is welcome. So far it's stable.

Cheers Bazza

[ED_4]

So how is this run. You run the program first then tell it to have the train.exe use more than the 2 gig memory and then save. But when starting to use train.exe do you open that LAA first then open train.exe?

[captain_bazza]

With XP you get mixed messages about how much RAM is available, but it's always over 2+ gb, depending on which utility is giving you the figure.

Cheers Bazza

[captain_bazza]

For example:

Win XP WTM says Physical Memory total 3405292kb, available 2767804kb.

Win XP Sys Info says Physical Memory 2.59gb

FreeRamXP reports 2.17gb free

Piriform Speccy reports 2.6gb.

All these report 3.5gb, which is the max that XP sees, but some of the above knows that 4 gb of ram is installed.

Cheers Bazza