System Tweaking Guide - Ramdisk - By Mark "Frugal" Bush
The following tweak
was submitted by Blaze
and is specific to Falcon 4 although could be easily adapted
to almost any game with a little bit of work. To be quite honest
I hadn't even considered people with 256 + MB ram. This was somewhat
remiss of me. So thanks a lot Blaze.
In case you have lots of RAM (256+ MB) and like me, you're not
convinced that F4 makes efficient use of it, why not set up a
RAMDisk and put the important files in there, to speed up load
times and minimze the in_flight disk access? After a long search,
I just stumbled over this nice freeware called XMSDSK, it allows
you to set up a fixed ramdisk of up to 1GB (if available! ;-).
Off my 512MB, I created a 350MB disk and copied the whole \falcon4
folder into it, still left with 170MB RAM for Windows. A little
change to the Falcon4 path entries in the registry and up I go.
Wow!
I was already running off a 10,000 rpm U2W SCSI drive, but this
is like night and day. Entering a campaign mission (all graphics
sliders, except vehicle mag, to the right) takes not even 10 seconds.
The harddisk is virtually going to powerdown mode, not a single
access while in flight. No more delays for loading textures/weapons
while browsing through the action view. So I recommend this program
to anyone with like 384MB, this way you could have a ramdisk of
about 200MB and put the \falcon4\terrdata folder into it, which
includes AFAIK the major stuff that gets loaded at mission startup.
Also, with this setup all savegames and pilot logs will be kept
on the harddisk, so you're not forced to copy the relevant files
back each time you exit Falcon (of course all data in the ramdisk
is lost once you reboot or shutdown your computer!). Oh yeah,
get the program here:
What to copy depends on your RAM, but so far I see only two useful
sizes of a ramdisk installation anyway. Either you copy the whole
\Falcon4 (from a typical install, i.e. all but movies - about
320MB) or just the \terrdata folder (about 195MB). I would just
suggest that you have atleast 64MB of RAM available after creating
the ramdisk, to not hinder the plain Windows functionality. As
for the path entries, you should know how to use regedit.exe or
any similar program. Look for the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\MicroProse\Falcon\4.0],
the relevant paths are baseDir (only if you really copy the whole
installation to the RAM), objectDir, misctexDir and theaterDir,
the latter three appearantly point to the \terrdata folder. Before
you start changing anything, I recommend a) to backup the whole
registry (for obvious reasons) and b) to also export the certain
key (for easier restore). Once you've made the appropriate changes
you could export the changed key as well, to simply switch back
and forth with a simple double click.
After some more testing I came to the conclusion that the approach
with only the \terrdata in RAM is the best one. There is virtually
no performance gain (for mission load time and in flight) by copying
the whole installation, besides that it needs more RAM, the initial
copy procedure takes longer and, as I said before, all log data
and saved games will be written to the ramdisk only, so they would
be lost in case of a crash to desktop (unless you ALT-TAB out
and copy them manually to the HD every now and then).
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