Solving the Loadgame AI Bug - A suggested approach

[Kull]

kull: what's the state of this now? Do you have a working solution with the Dual-boot Hibernate strategy with the Gag45 thing?

In short, "Yes". Let me start with the requirements:

1) Either a second hard drive or a partition, each with a functioning Operating System. In my case, it's two hard drives, both loaded with Windows XP (SP2).

2) Download GAG45 (link posted above) and use it to create a bootable floppy. Although you can load GAG45 into the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your hard drive, I don't recommend it. Instead, follow the directions and load it exclusively on the floppy, and make sure you identify each O/S with a different name (so you don't forget which WinXP is the one with RTW running)

3) Now boot into the secondary O/S using the GAG45 floppy, and load RTW along with any desired patches or mods. To minimize the chance of errors, you probably shouldn't use this O/S for anything other than RTW. Again, you're going to be playing a game without saving, possibly for months, so don't add complexity.

4) Start up your game, play as long as you like, and then minimize it to the desktop. To go into hibernate, click the "Start" button and select "Turn off computer". The shut down menu will appear - press the "Shift" key and you'll see the yellow "Stand-By" button change to "Hibernate". Click this and your computer will shut down.

5) To start up your primary O/S, just boot normally. To get into the secondary O/S (with RTW), boot with the GAG45 floppy and then select either O/S, and the system will go through the "restore from hibernate" start-up sequence. When your desktop appears, voila, there's RTW just as you left it!


Issues/Problems:

Of course, there HAVE to be problems, right? Probably not a complete list, but here they are:

1) Sounds disappear. As in, you now play the whole game with no sounds! Maybe the load-AI bug ain't so bad after all? Anyway, others have reported this, and I'm not sure if it's directly related to hibernate or just a consequence of tabbing down to the desktop. If anyone has a fix, please post!

2) After rebooting into your primary O/S, Windows can tell that something's been going on and insists on running CheckDisk. It won't find a problem, and it can be pretty timeconsuming with big hard drives, so bypass the test immediately. Of course if you aren't paying attention (like me 80% of the time), you won't notice until it's running the test! If anyone knows a safe way to cancel CheckDisk, please post!

3) It seems odd that the GAG45 floppy ignores your O/S selection and just automatically restores from Hibernate (see item 5 above) - and thus removing the floppy is the only way to boot normally into the primary O/S. So this MAY be a unique feature to my system, which means your results might differ.

4) Not all systems come with 3.5 Floppy Drives these days, so I'm not sure what you would do if your system is "floppy-less". Ideas anyone?

5) Be very careful about adding thing to your RTW disk/partition from the primary O/S. When the system reboots from hibernate it expects that things will look a certain way, and something as simple as a different icon on the desktop might cause a problem. I haven't tested this to see what causes crashes and what doesn't, but keep it in mind.

Hopefully others will test this out on their systems, and perhaps we can fine-tune and improve the process, but for now here is a tested, albeit "less-than-perfect", solution to the LoadGame/AI bug.