Solving the Loadgame AI Bug - A suggested approach

[Crandaeolon]

In theory, you could use Virtual PC on a WinXP Pro host to create a "guest" operating system (for example, XP Home that is used only to play RTW) that you could hibernate / restore without affecting the host OS. It would, of course, be limited to playing a single campaign, effectively running RTW "all the time", but with the convenience of shutting it down when needed.

You could even create multiple virtual operating systems for playing several campaigns at once, but that'd take a corresponding increase in configuration work and hard drive space for multiple installations of OSes and Rome.

This would be a very hardcore approach, costing a lot of $$, time and HD space... and it would probably have its own problems, such as affecting performance. But... you could eliminate the bug! ...maybe.

Edit: I'll stress once more that this is just speculation. I have no real idea if it would work or not, and most likely it wouldn't be worth the expenses, time, and grief.

Edit 2: Dug this up from Micro$oft.

Users switch between operating systems as easily as they switch between applications. They simply click the window containing the virtual machine. They can pause individual virtual machines so they stop using CPU cycles on the physical computer. They can also save virtual machines to disk and restore them at a later time. The restoration process normally takes a few seconds—much faster than restarting the guest operating system.

Sounds like it would work, then. Who has the money?

Edit 3 (last edit, I promise ): Link to the product overview.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/vir...rview2004.mspx