Majesty 1 slowing down [Archive] - Steam Users' Forums

IcySaracen

04-26-2010, 11:36 AM

Hey, im running Majesty gold (on steam) and its constantly slowing down, especially when more units are moving around the map. I run a 4 GB RAM, Intel Core ip5, with 1 GB graphics card ATI.

Some people are saying they have no difficulties running it on their machine which is more advance then mine. Any people experiencing the same problem?

Kornstalx

07-24-2010, 10:09 AM

Yeah i am having the same issues
i am running
Win7 64bit
12GB DDR3 ram
intel i7 940
and 2 xfx radeon black editions 5970's in crossfire X

it is quiet annoying

The slowdown is caused by the way DirectDraw is directly integrated into the Win7 UI. Under XP you could manually seperate or disable DDraw via dxdiag, but there's no way to do this anymore under Win7.

One workaround you should try is by alt tabbing out after starting, and manually killing the explorer process. This is a sloppy workaround as you'll have to use task manager to restart explorer after you exit the game, but it works. More info (including making batch shortcuts that will autoset proc affinity) is here, about halfway down:

http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showthread.php?t=400836&page=3

Another workaround, and the one I finally did, was simply setup a true dual-boot of XP just so you can play Majesty :) I tried Virtualbox (XP-Mode) for a while, but the mouse control was a bit wonky.

EDIT:
I couldn't find the original thread to link to, explaining the part about killing explorer, so I'll do a quick rehash:

1) Start Majesty Gold.
2) Alt Tab out and bring up Task Manager (ctl+alt+del)
3) Right click on explorer.exe, and End Process. Don't freak out, all it does is kill your desktop and taskbar (which is precisely what is causing the DDraw conflict with old DX7ish games like Majesty)
4) When you're done playing and exit the game, you won't have a desktop. Bring up Task Manager again and select File -> New Task (Run). Type Explorer.exe, and viola. No need to reboot.