BF42 Tweak Guide for Older Computers

Started by Atomm · 16 posts · 7,652 views

  2. #2
    Thanks for the reminder Atomm. I think I said that I would do a full write up of what I have done to get the dinosaur to work with the 1.6 patch. I will try to do that shortly. That tweaktown article is the basis, but there are a bunch of other things that I have done as well. Hopefully I can remember them all.
  3. #3
    As a teaser....
    Standard config on my PC utilizes about 300MB of Ram at idle with only anti-virus software and a DSL connection on.
    BF1942 Config utilizes about 70-80MB at idle, with the DSL connected.
  4. #4
    Interesting... I am very interested to see what you come up with 🙂
  5. #5
    OMG EPHIL! Did you just explode or something? There are all these's colors on your post......
  6. #6
    Ha! I am playing... Let me be!! 🙂
  7. #7
    been slacking on this. A hd upgrade sidetracked me big time. Need to get this done this week though.
  8. #8
    Tweaking the dinosaur, or how I got my older PC to work with the 1.6 patch.

    Current System Specs
    AMD Athlon 1.0 Ghz
    Chaintech 7AJA2 motherboard with onboard sound
    512 MB PC133 ram
    ATI Radeon 9600 (agp)
    Belkin 10/100 NIC
    External Westell DSL Modem
    80GB WD EIDE hard drive w/ 8mb cache
    Windows XP Professional, completely up to date.

    This all started when I downloaded and installed the Battlefield 1942 1.6 patch. When I played on line after doing that, I would get choppy game play and stuttering when on a server of more than about 25 people. I used to get the same issue on certain maps (Midway and Battle of Britain if lots of people on) with my old (32MB) video card before I upgraded that (along with another 128MB of RAM) over the holidays. However this time financial constraints prevented me from doing another upgrade. So I set out to improve the performance of my machine without making any hardware upgrades.

    The caveats: First thing in looking at this is that it is possibly incomplete. Due to my penchant for not writing things down as I do them, it is entirely likely that I have forgotten to include some change that I made in this. Also, as the results of tweaking your PC will vary from machine to machine, Keep that in mind when something doesn’t work, or doesn’t work well.

    I am going to go through the basic steps that I used, but will leave many of the details to the various resources that I tapped for this project.

    Process

    Step 1: Make sure that all drivers for the pc are the most current. Defrag the HD and do a clean install of Battlefield. You could also take this a step further and do a clean install of windows and your other apps as well.

    Step 2: Create a custom hardware profile that minimizes the number of windows services and other resource using applications that are active. I used this tweak (http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak1554.aspx) from TweakXP as a guide to how to do it, and the listing of services here (http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak114.aspx) that I could shut down, or change to a manual setting.

    Step 3: Create a custom user profile that I call “Gaming” to set desktop and other system preferences. Once that user is logged on, I set my desktop for performance by right clicking on the start menu, selecting properties, and choosing the classic desktop which uses significantly less resources than the WinXP setup.

    Step 4: I next opened up system properties, advanced tab, performance options and set for “best performance”. Also within the System Properties you can change the virtual memory settings, which I adjusted slightly to lower the initial size of the pagefile. Given my current configuration, I did not change much but this Microsoft article (http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/expertz...es/03june16.asp) goes into various ways to optimize the virtual memory on a pc.

    Step 5: The final change that I made in the system properties was to disable the system restore which frees up additional system resources and disk space. This may be something to be cautious with. I have nothing on this PC that is not quickly replaceable so if it crashes, it is not a big deal. However, it may not be for everyone.

    Step 6: Removed a winmodem that I had leftover from my dial-up days. I was using it only as a pass through for the phone on my desk. I found a longer cable and plugged the phone directly into the wall jack and removed the modem. I also disabled my two (unused) COM ports as well.

    Step 7: I found a freeware tweak program called X-Setup Pro (http://www.x-setup.net/) that among other things, allows me to set the system to auto dump dlls when exiting programs. It also lets me not start applications that I would normally want to start (such as antivirus software) based on the user profile. The software easily allows you to shift something from starting with the machine to starting based on the user (as well as the reverse)

    Step 8: Uninstalled my Verizon DSL WinPoet PPPoE software and replaced it with RASPPPoE (http://www.raspppoe.com/) which installs at around 250kb and doesn’t eat up much bandwidth.

    Step 9: In game settings. This is where I relied upon Tweaktowns Battlefield 1942 Tweak Guide (http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dTyp...=review&dId=420) very heavily. I customized my video and audio according to their suggestions and using the premise that framerate = life, set things very low. I continually tweak the game settings to try to balance performance and visuals.

    Step 10: In multiplayer, the first thing that I do is open the console and type “pb_sleep 500”. This seems to make a big difference in that it reduces significantly how often PunkBuster checks status. Also followed many of the suggestions laid out in the FAQ at the PunkBuster website (http://www.evenbalance.org/index.php?page=...=faq-bf1942.php).


    Resources

    Battlefield 1942 tweak guide at Tweaktown.com
    http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dTyp...=review&dId=420

    Broadband tweak guide at Tweaktown.com
    http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dTyp...e=review&dId=93Broadband reports tools: http://www.dslreports.com/tools
    http://www.speedguide.net
    RASPPPoE – low overhead freeware PPPoE software for DSL
    http://www.raspppoe.com/
    System Optimization Guide for gamers from Tweaktown http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dTyp...=review&dId=411
    Windows services that can be shutdown or set to manual from TweakXP
    http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak114.aspxSetting up a new hardware profile from TweakXP
    http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak1554.aspx
    Tweaking Windows XP from Tweaktown.com
    http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=review&dId=120 (part 1)
    http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=review&dId=145 (part 2)
    Another Windows XP tweak guide from Tweakhound.com
    http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks1.htm
    PunkBuster Website
    http://www.evenbalance.org/index.php
  9. #9
    You rock sarge, even with double the muscle I seen a big increase in performance.
  10. #10
    glad I could help. I have hit the limits on what I can squeeze out of mine without overclocking. So my next step is either to do that or invest in a new proc or more memory.
  11. #11
    FYI, This is a tip Raze told me about to make your maps load faster. It's worth pursuing.

    3) Also in the same default.con change default map 'Game.setGameLevelPath Bf1942/Levels/Tobruk/'
    to Berlin so it looks like this 'Game.setGameLevelPath Bf1942/Levels/Berlin/' At just over 6 MBs Berlin is the smallest map to use as the default loader so your game should load quicker (Tobruk is 33MBs).
    With 2 and 3 the top part of your Default.con should look like this;
    Game.setGameLevelPath Bf1942/Levels/Berlin/
    Game.useMenu 1
    Game.useHud 1
    Game.menuMain BattlefieldMenu
    Game.menuInGame InGame
    Game.menuMap Map
    Game.DebugCallbackDisabled 0
    Game.SoundBuffersize 400
  12. #12
    YES! It decreased my load times on the laptop by 50%. Very much worth looking into if your BF1942 maps take a long time to load. This setting is not used in BFV.
  13. #13
    Atomm.
    Your tip from Raze starts at number 3) ...
    Is there a 1) and 2) and are there more than 3)?
  14. #14
    Actually it should start at 11) :-)
  15. #15
    I snagged it from another post. The rest of the stuff is covered in this thread. I just wanted to point that part out.
  16. #16
    Since we're playing BF 1942 again occasionally, I thought I'd post this link.

    http://intel.planetbattlefield.gamespy.com/faq.html

    You guys are old hands at BF42, but sometimes you forget stuff when too much time has passed - and it will be a handy reference for me.