A few Win7 32bit challenges

[whatnot]

Gents,

I have a 7 & XP dualboot and I'm trying to get rid of my old XP installation so I installed now IL-2 on the 7 too. I got it working after doing some googling and tweaking but some issues persist so a few questions:

1) The sounds on my headphones are weird. When I turn my head (TIR) the engine sounds change quite unrealistically and in some head positions the sounds just disappear. It didn't react like this in XP and I tried copying the conf.ini from my previous installation, but didn't help. Is there a way I could just deactivete this 'sound panning' or whatever it is so turning my head wouldn't affect it?

2) I lof 6DOF and can't live without it, glitches or not. I don't want to start any debate on this topic as I know it's been had too many times before, but is the only way of getting it to work through mods and if I mod with shr, ultrapac or whatever does it mean that I can't join online servers as I have modded version?

3) A simple one: how do I copy control config (stick & keyboard) from one installation to another? conf.ini doesn't do the trick so in which file is it stored?

If all of these are already answered in the past x years please give me a hint what to look for as I couldn't find answers through a search on these forums.

Thanks in advance!

[KG26_Alpha]

Hi

1. install the Win 7 audio driver.

2. correct

3. have a look in your users folder

Why didn't you go for Win 7 64bit ?

[BadAim]

I'm running IL2 in win7 64 bit with no trouble. The biggest problem you will run into is that if you install it in the "program" folder you have to turn UAC off or it won't work properly as you cant write anything to the folders once it's installed (this includes the conf.ini file). SO you'll have to either turn off uac or install IL2 to another folder.

As for the sound problem, double check that the game is set to 'Headphones', otherwise you'll have dead spots, like you are describing. (the pesky folder problem could be your trouble here too, as Il2 can't seve the settings properly in read only mode).

6DOF: yeah, your options are limited.

[whatnot]

Can I find any servers that allow the 6dof mod to be installed?

And to Alpha: 64bit still scares me compatibility wise and I doubt I will see a major performance boost. Am I wrong on the performance side?

[KG26_Alpha]

Google 64bit v 32bit

I could post a whole tech thing here but its easy to find your own way

[Blackdog_kt]

I am dual booting on a separate hard disk and have installed win7 64 bit. Granted, my XP installation is kind of bogged down and "dirty" (lot's of stuff installed) compared to my win7 installation (which only has a couple of things installed, i haven't fully migrated yet), but i was still surprised to see that win7 64 was considerably faster in things like alt+tabbing in and out of games than my XP 32.

To top it off, Win7 is installed on a slower hard drive...5400RPM western digital 1.5TB, as opposed to the seagate 1.5TB that i boot XP from... that seagate is either 7200 or 10000 RPM (i can't recall exactly which), which is considerably faster. And still XP feels slower in many regards. Win7 also gives better performance in some newer games/demos i have tried. Where win7 is slower is usually file tranfers involving a lot of small/medium sized files (i was moving data back and forth between the drives for backup purposes), but it could be a function of the slower WD drive as i was moving files to that one.

To be really sure i'd have to test it with hard drives of equal speeds and do it both ways for both OSs (moving the same files from seagate to WD and vice versa, once for each OS), which can't be really done as my WD requires special drivers to work at optimal speed under XP. I didn't install these drivers because they are not required for Vista/Win7, that WD is booting win7 and everything that i run under XP is located on the other drive. Since everything that runs under win7 is loading from the drive that boots win7, i opted not to install the XP compatibility package.

In any case, if your PC can handle win7 64 i think it's a good OS, much better than Vista was initially and probably what Vista wanted to be. I'm running it on an i7 920 stock (no overclocking at all), Ati 4890 1GB and 3GB of RAM (in 3x1GB sticks tripple channel configuration). Funny enough, just booting the system eats up an entire GB of my RAM but i have a suspicion that it's well optimized for pre-caching, for example alt+tabbing from a game to the desktop is nearly instantaneous in win7 64 despite the increased memory usage and eye-candy, while in XP 32 there is a noticeable delay. Win7 64 also boots faster in the portion of the boot up to the login screen, but has visible delays during loading the desktop on first use, or whenever something new is installed. That's another reason i'm suspecting there's a kind of pre-caching algorithm at work, it takes some more time to load up the desktop properly but then everything clearly seems faster.

I guess that having 4GB or more of RAM would really make win7 64 shine (that's actually the main reason i installed it, i might get another set of 3x1GB RAM sticks when SOW is released and the total RAM would be unusable without a 64 bit OS) as long as you are running new stuff and not something older that might have compatibility issues. For example, all my current games i run under XP, but when SoW comes i'll be running it under Win7 64.

[Fearfactor]

The best way to get IL2 going in Win 7 is not to install it, but just copy it from and older install ( if you kept it). In this case it sounds like you did just that. IL2 does not need to be properly installed, because it does not need any of the few registry keys that are installed in a proper install. I've been doing that for years and it's even how I got IL2 going when I went from Win98SE to WinXP back in the day. I have six variations of IL2 and they all work great and they are copies of copies of copies by now.

The myth of the 'fresh install' when it comes to IL2 refuses to die. A fresh install is important and even necessary for a lot of games but not IL2!! If an older install has no corrupted files it's good to go. If everything works, such as FMB, QMB, the track player and DGEN ( if you use DGEN ) and it runs good frames rates, then nothing is corrupted. Game files are either corrupted or they are not, one or the other. And if they are corrupted, something or maybe nothing will work, as simple as that!!

[whatnot]

Originally Posted by KG26_Alpha

Google 64bit v 32bit

I could post a whole tech thing here but its easy to find your own way

Did some googling on this and the only advantage I can find is the ability to allocate more memory and on the downside there were the compatibility issues on drivers and performance impact on some not optimized sw.

Since I have only 4 gigs I'd get only the downside of the comparisons I guess?

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by whatnot

Since I have only 4 gigs I'd get only the downside of the comparisons I guess?

No, you'd get the whole 4 gigs, as opposed to the 4 gigs minus the memory on your video card and any other memory mapped in your computer that isn't in the actual 4 gigs of RAM. You typically only get to use something like 3.2 gigs in a computer with a 32bit O/S (with a 512mB video card, with a 1GB card you'd be looking at something like 2.7 gigs of useable RAM, with a smaller capacity video card, you'd have more useable RAM).