Introversion

I've found that on my computer all introversion games (uplink, darwinia, defcon) run much smoother on my computer when set to run off 1 cpu core rather than both. I really don't mind setting the affinity from the control panel however, in defcon, the alt-tabbing back into the game results in my chat box being either totally unresponsive to the keyboard or the text filled with strange or even the wrong letters. As such I'm left to either choose between a smooth running game where I can't talk with the other players or a jerky one with chat. If anyone has a suggestion as how to resolve this that would be appreciated.

Press escape twice rather than alt-tabbing.

I'm running DualCore duo, and I've got not problems with ALT Tabbing at all.

you can force the core being used by a program pretty easily. Try StartAffinity.

http://budda.phpwebhosting.com/StartAffinity/

Command Line Examples:

startaffinity notepad 0
(would run notepad on cpu 0)

startaffinity notepad 1
(would run notepad on cpu1)

startaffinity notepad 0 1
(would run notepad on cpus 1 and 0.)




Just drop the exe in your windows directory then modify your shortcuts to include startaffinity for anything you want to set the mask for.




Hmm.. i just realized this may be a little tough if you have the steam version - unless you can launch it outside of steam itself..

No problem at all on Introversion games with Intel CPU's... played all their games on Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, and a Quad Xeon... all alt-tab okay.

You should have pasted what type of CPU you have - there's various problems with AMD dual cores and games out there, none of which occur with Intel CPU's.

Actually the escape twice thing seems to work for now. Yes, I have the steam version, and editing the .exe files with affinity masks makes steam angry. I have an AMD 4200+ X2 with the up to date driver installed. I hope that some of this gets looked into at some point, but now that I have it working again I'm not going to worry about it too much. Thanks for the help and advice guys.

Launch n Set is your friend. It will let you set the affinity before you even start the program, without any messy modifying of executables. It runs in the systray. Check it out, best solution I've found for those pesky dual cores issues.