Can I trick this game into thinking I have 16MB video RAM?

[Giscardo]

My roomate just got a laptop, a Compaq Armada E500. It comes with an ATI Rage mobility Pro, which has 8 megs of video ram. We installed a real time strategy game called Battle Realms, which is a 3d rendered game. The minimum requirements state it needs 16 megs of video ram to run. But since this video card is agp, is there some way to get the game to use the main system memory to make up for not having 16 megs of video ram (he has 192 megs of ram and is using windows XP)? Is it possible to upgrade either the video memory, or the video card on this notebook? Thanks for any help you guys can give!

 

[VBboy]

The game will ask the DirectX API to check the Windows videocard driver for the videomemory size, which will be happy to report it as 8 MB. You can't trick it. You can't add memory to that videocard, either.

Don't worry, no modern 3d game would run on that videocard anyway, regardless of how many MB of video memory it has. Only the newest videocards (GeForce2Go, Radeon Mobility 7500) can run games well (I mean, at 50+ FPS at 800x600x32). I can't play anything but the OpenGL version of Doom2 on my Celery 466 with Rage Mobility 8 MB.

Sorry.

 

[Zim Hosein]

Giscardo. interesting threory, but I believe that games look at Windows SYS Info, before loading, thus making a way of tricking a game about h/w specs. to be inflated, not possible. Just my opinion, wish you luck though.

 

[VBboy]

Are you sure there is no option for "reduced graphics" or "low quality mode" to make it run with that videocard? Check the game options...

 

[VBboy]

The only thing you can do with the AGP configuration is from BIOS. Press whatever non-standard key Compaq wants you to press to get into BIOS (F1, F10, spacebar, smiley face), and look for the "AGP apperture size" or similar setting. You can set it to 64 MB or so, but it won't do you much good because that game doesn't need that much texture memory).

It still won't help you trick the game.

If your friend can return the laptop, he or she should Dell makes some nice ones. Sorry if I sound negative.. I don't like Compaq.

 

[Giscardo]

Cool, thanks for the help, i guess he'll just have to play star wars galactic battlegrounds instead. If you guys still feel like helping me and my roomate out, I'm about to post in the network section about the best way for us to share our cable modem connection.