Launching the Game on Modern CPUs With Special K (2022)

A guide on stopping the game from instantly crashing when you try to launch it on a PC with a modern CPU.

Intro

As of As of 12/3/2023, Capcom has updated the game to allow CPUs with more threads to run the game without problems, hopefully rendering this guide obsolete. I will leave the guide up as it is a potential solution for other games that are still being broken by their outdated CPU requirements, and I'd like to remember the people who I manged to help over this past year. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Capcom.

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So after an entire afternoon of reading through the message boards and banging my head against the wall, I've managed to get this game to successfully launch on my PC. That's no guarantee that it'll run without crashes, but for now I'll take the victories that I can get.

This is a guide on how to (hopefully) get Strider to properly run on your PC if your CPU has more than 8 cores. Here, we will be employing the use of Special K to fix the game's incompatibility problems. According to the Special K Wiki:

"Lovingly referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of PC gaming, Special K does a bit of everything. It is best known for fixing and enhancing graphics, its many detailed performance analysis and correction mods, and a constantly growing palette of tools that solve a wide variety of issues affecting PC games."

Remember that PCs aren't all the same like consoles. What worked for me may not work for you. Still I will now explain what I did, in the hope that this will help somebody else who is being frustrated by this abandonware's refusal to start.

My System:

Windows 10 64bit
Intel Core i9 10900K (10 cores, 20 threads)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
LG 27 inch 1440p 144hz monitor 27GN850-B
2 TB SSD Hard Drive (I have no drives below 1 TB, but the sounds work anyway despite PCGamingWiki's warnings.)

The Process

Step 1:

Download Special K from here:

https://wiki.special-k.info/SpecialK/Local
https://discourse.differentk.fyi/t/download-special-k/1461

If you don't have them already, the first link will point you at the required 32-bit and 64-bit Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributables.



The second link will send you to a download of the actual program. You want the Stable Archive download as I won't be covering a full global install, only a local, game-specific one.



Step 2:

Open the SpecialK.7z file with an archiver program like 7-Zip[www.7-zip.org] and copy the SpecialK64.dll to the desktop. Right click it, select Rename and change it to dxgi.dll

Right click the desktop and select New > Text Document. Open it and copy this text to it:

[FrameRate.Control]
OverrideCPUCoreCount=8



(YMMV based on the circumstances of your CPU. The PCGamingWiki page says that the game will suffer issues on CPUs with more than 8 cores, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the game has to only run on 8 CPU threads. While I played the game with the CPU override set to use 8 processors, I was also able to launch the game at 16, which makes sense since on the i9 10900K, every one core uses two threads, or processors. So for me, playing the game with a CPU override of 8 likely resulted in only using 4 out of 10 cores. I'm trying to learn this as I go along, here.)

Save the text document and rename it to dxgi.ini and click yes at the prompt. Now you should have two files, dxgi.dll and dxgi.ini on your desktop.

Step 3:

Find the location of your game's folder. In this case, that would likely be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Strider if you didn't change your default game library location. A simple way to find this folder is to open Steam, go to your game library, right click Strider and select Manage > Browse local files. Copy the dxgi.dll and dxgi.ini files into this folder.



Step 4:

The two files that we edited will allow Special K to inject itself into the game and make it so that the game will always launch, regardless of how many cores your CPU has. The problem is that it cannot do any of that unless the game manages to properly launch without its help once! Let's make that happen.

In your Windows search bar, type msconfig. This would open the System Configuration window. Select the Boot tab, and then select the Advanced Options button. In the window that opens, check the Number of Processors box, select 8 and hit Ok.



Hit Apply in the System Configuration window and then OK. Restart your computer.

Once the computer has restarted, attempt to launch the game again. If everything went the way it was supposed to, your game should successfully launch with Special K successfully injected into it. You will know because of the large grey box of text that slides in from above, explaining how to access SpecialK's interface.



The game now only pays attention to the number of CPUs you've selected in the dxgi.ini file, which means you can change your PC back to normal. Type msconfig in the Windows Search Bar to go into System Configuration, select the Boot tab, click on Advanced Options, uncheck the Number of Processors box, hit Ok to close that window, hit Apply and OK in the System Configuration window and restart the PC.

If the game still runs after the PC restarts, congratulations. Your long nightmare is over.

Afterword

Cleaning Up:

1. You are free to get rid of any lingering files on your desktop, you don't need them anymore. If the gray box from Special K is an annoyance, follow its instructions to open the Special K Control Panel, expand the On Screen Display (OSD) drop down menu and set Show Startup Banner from 20.0 to 0. If you want to stop Special K's achievement notifications from appearing, open the Control Panel, go to Steam Enhancements and then Achievements. Uncheck the box by Play Sound, go into the Enhanced Popup menu and make sure that Draw Mode is set to Disabled.

Don't forget how to activate the interface if you need it. CTRL+SHIFT+BACKSPACE, or Menu+View/Start+Select on a controller.

2. These fixes will remain on your PC as long as you don't directly move or delete the relevant files, dxgi.dll and dxgi.ini. Deleting the game through Steam will not have an effect on them. The logs and the SK_Res folders will also survive deletion, but aren't necessary to get the game to run.

What you can do is copy these items to a backup drive, so you can have them on hand when the time comes to move to a new PC. Know that there's no guarantee that they will still work on a new OS, Processor, GPU, etc. That's just the nature of PC gaming.

Closing Thoughts:

After completing a playthough of the game, I'd say that the game is very much in playable condition. The game crashed to desktop once after several hours of play, after which I set the game to Windows 7 Compatibility Mode. I didn't get another crash after that, although the music did cut out once. Nothing I couldn't fix with a quick exit to the menu.

That could just be great luck on my end, so take that as you will. I hope this helps someone out there.

[Kaed✩Wolf]

Today's patch seems to have finally resolved this issue.

[Hoots7]

"Sciencebob Aug 20 @ 10:08am
This only works for me if I leave the boot cores at or below the 8'ish threshold. When I turn off the core delimited boot option, the game will not run. The .ini and .dll files are in place still but I wonder if there is something else in the .ini that overwritten/changed when the boot core options are changed back? Any ideas/help? thank"
I have the same problem, it works but will not if I change the MSconfig settings back to the default
Any suggestions?

[Hoots7]

thank you, Thank You. THANK YOU!! It worked

[Shock ZX]

Probably a CPU bottleneck. Go back to dxgi.ini and type a higher number into the OverrideCPUCoreCount= line. 9, 10, 11 etc. Take it upwards until the game refuses to launch, or you get to 60fps.

[MrBalin]

I got it to run, but the FPS is only at 15-27.
Any suggestions to get it to run faster?

[Sciencebob]

Hello! Thank you for the response!

I have an AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12 core (24 LP).

Yes, Special K UI did show up and the game was stable when the boot cores were limited to 8, so I would imagine that its not an issue with the .ini file???

I will give it a shot though. Thank you for the help!

[Shock ZX]

Go into Task Manager (Esc+Shift+Control). Click the performance tab. Click on CPU. What CPU do you have? How many cores does it have? How many logical processors (threads) does it have?

Does the Special K UI show up when you launch the game with limited cores?

If I were in your spot I would go back to dxgi.ini and change the OverrideCPUCoreCount= line to a different number. Change it to 1, then attempt to launch the game. If that fails, change the number to 2, try again, and so on.

[Sciencebob]

This only works for me if I leave the boot cores at or below the 8'ish threshold. When I turn off the core delimited boot option, the game will not run. The .ini and .dll files are in place still but I wonder if there is something else in the .ini that overwritten/changed when the boot core options are changed back? Any ideas/help? thanks

[LazyTomato]

I bought this game years ago (BEFORE upgrading my CPU to one it apparently doesn't like) and finally got around to playing it today while in a metroidvania mood... You have no idea how thankful I am for this, for a second I was scared I'd ended up with a digital paperweight of a game.

[denpa onna (real)]

I wanted to check if using the run option to set affinity to use the first eight cores would work, but uh, it doesn't crash for me in general, on an Intel i7-10700K.

If anyone is still having issues with the game, mind checking if running via a .bat in the same folder with the following command works?:
start /affinity [value] StriderX64_r.exe

As a guide for how to set which cores you're using, think of your cores as being a row of toggle switches, with ON represented by 1 and OFF represented by 0. You can visualize this as 1111111111111111 if you have 16 cores, for the default behavior of all cores being on. If you want to switch off the first core, you change the 1 at the end to a 0. If you want to switch off the sixteenth core, the change the 1 at the beginning to 0. You've just made the binary value you want to set the affinity. After that, run it through a binary -> hexadecimal converter and you have your desired value for the /affinity command