första träffen på google, på "grim fandango +windows xp"
Q. My game intermittently locks up, or my cursor leaves trails on the screen (hyperthreading). Is there any way to fix this? A. Hyperthreading is a technique used by XP to make your single processor appear as two processors. The theory is that while one process is blocked waiting for something to happen (like a block of data to be read from disk), another process can be running away blissfully on the other virtual processor. Some Windows games that were written before the advent of XP cannot handle this thread switching scenario, and will randomly freeze up. Here are a few examples:
Grim Fandango
Thief: The Dark Project
Outcast
Tex Murphy: Overseer
To find out if your PC has hyperthreading enabled:
Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> Computer
And if you don't see: ACPI Multiprocessor PC, then you DO NOT have hyperthreading enabled.
If your PC does have hyperthreading enabled, there is a universal patch programme that you can run to permanently bind a particular application to a single processor. We have archived it for you here: imagecfg.zip. Just download that file and unzip it. Then copy the IMAGECFG.EXE file to the folder:
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
Now you can run this programme from anywhere. To fix up a particular game, install the game first. Then open a Command Prompt via:
Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt
Figure out where your game's main executable file is (right-clicking on the game's icon and examining the Properties is a pretty safe bet). Using Grim Fandango as an example, you would enter something like this at the Command Prompt (note the quotation marks around the path to Grim.exe. These are only necessary if the path contains any spaces, but it does no harm to include them anyway):
imagecfg -a 0x1 "C:\Program Files\LucasArts\GRIM\Grim.exe"
And you should see the following output:
C:\Program Files\LucasArts\GRIM\Grim.exe contains no configuration infor
mation
C:\Program Files\LucasArts\GRIM\Grim.exe contains a Subsystem Version of
4.0
C:\Program Files\LucasArts\GRIM\Grim.exe updated with the following conf
iguration information:
Process Affinity Mask: 00000001
Done! Now you shouldn't even have to run the game in Windows 95/98 Compatibility Mode.
No point in mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.