Is anyone familiar with NTCore’s 4GB patch, to allow 32 bit games to use 4GB ram on 64 bit platforms?

[CorneliusPOTA]

I’m just wondering if anyone is familiar with NTCore’s 4GB patch? It allows 32 bit games to use 4GB ram on modern 64 bit platforms to stop crashing in certain older games like the original Saints Row 3, Aliens: Colonial Marines, The Amazing Spider-Man, Far Cry 3, Deadly Premonition, to name a few.
I’ve had to use it on a few older games so far and it did help with the crashing issues.

”This very little tool patches x86 executables in order to let them have 4GB (instead of only 2) of virtual memory on x64 platforms. This tool comes very handy for applications which need a great amount of virtual memory like games, 3D renderization, multimedia etc.”

I wanted to see if it would be necessary to use this on most 32 bit games, or only the ones that constantly crash due to memory issues. Would it cause any problems if it was used in a 32 bit game, and it wasn’t needed? I’m not super knowledgable when it comes to this and just wanted to ask.

Thanks

[ReBoot]

No idea about "NTCore" specifically. Marking an application as 4 GB aware is a matter of simply flipping a bit in the PE header. I've personally done this a bunch of times with editbin.

Now for the caveats: the reason why there's a flag for that to begin with are dumb programmers doing dumb math on pointers. Meaning if said application is written by said dumb programmers, it will crash even more when given more memory than it can actually deal with. You can't know in advance though. So in other words, back up the executable, try it, observe results. If it crashes less, keep the changed executable. If it crashes more, restore the backup. Then there's the possibility that absolutely nothing changes (because running out of 2 GB of memory isn't the only cause for crashes). In that case, I personally would restore the backup in such a case.

In case of doubt, consult PCGamingWiki. It usually tells when a game can be improved by giving it more memory to work with.

[CorneliusPOTA]

Originally posted by ReBoot:

No idea about "NTCore" specifically. Marking an application as 4 GB aware is a matter of simply flipping a bit in the PE header. I've personally done this a bunch of times with editbin.

Now for the caveats: the reason why there's a flag for that to begin with are dumb programmers doing dumb math on pointers. Meaning if said application is written by said dumb programmers, it will crash even more when given more memory than it can actually deal with. You can't know in advance though. So in other words, back up the executable, try it, observe results. If it crashes less, keep the changed executable. If it crashes more, restore the backup. Then there's the possibility that absolutely nothing changes (because running out of 2 GB of memory isn't the only cause for crashes). In that case, I personally would restore the backup in such a case.

In case of doubt, consult PCGamingWiki. It usually tells when a game can be improved by giving it more memory to work with.

Yeah, all the NTCore app does is patch the exe to allow it to use 4GB instead of 2GB. It’s the easier way for us noobs to do the large address aware thing with one click.

I just wasn’t sure if all older 32bit games needed it, or just certain ones that keep crashing. I usually do check PCGamingWiki a lot before I start playing a game to see if it needs any fixes beforehand, but sometimes it doesn’t mention if an older game will need the 4GB patch applied to it, even when it does. I usually find some Steam forum post or guide then saying the game needs the 4GB patch to stop crashing.
Thats how I originally found out about the patch when someone on Steam posted about it to fix the crashing in The Amazing Spider-Man.

Thanks for the info, that’s all I needed to know. I’ll take it on a per-game basis and if I notice some crashing, I’ll see if it’s any better with the 4GB patch applied to the exe.
I was just playing through Batman: Arkham Asylum recently and that was fine, it didn’t need to be patched even though it was a 32 bit game. I was just wondering, that’s all. Thanks for the explanation.