Ironically, i have been playing Eador in my VirtualBox'ed Windows XP SP3 since i've upgraded my desktop rig (the current CPU is I5 2500k@4.3Ghz). :) So it can be considered a fail-safe way to get the game working on the modern hardware. This launcher is my recent attempt to get Eador playing outside the VM environment.

You may want to give the older launcher version (with BES instead of NtSleep) a try before moving to a VM. The link is still up in the first post.

Thank you, I will. Although I tried BES on my own and it didn't work at all, it made things worse actually.

I was unable to get the game to run on WMware workstation, but I haven't tried virtualbox, I think I will try it too later.

I am actually having much better results simply using the power settings to limit CPU to 50% mhz. My system as a whole is slower and its annoying, but the game works perfectly with it. With the ntsleep fix the game doesn't stutter constantly but every few seconds it will freeze for a little bit, the end result is playable but annoying and had me spent 2/3 of the time waiting for the game to unfreeze. (without doing anything the game stutters many times a second which is totally unplayable)

So I found something interesting that fixes my issues running the game. I wanted to see if there was some way to fix the timer issue in alleg43.dll and I opened the game in Ollydbg.

Simlpy running the game from Ollydbg fixes the issue for that session. I could even detach the Ollydbg and close it, and the game would still be running fine after that. I'll continue to see if there's any way to fix the dll, but if the other methods of getting the game to run well don't work for you, give that a shot. Just open the eador.exe in Ollydbg(v2+), press F9, detach, exit and you should be good to go.

The file in the OP worked perfectly for me! Thanks!

I tried the power management solution, which kinda worked, but the launcher gives a silky smooth framerate, while the power just gave me a playable jerkiness (probably about 20 FPS).

For the record, I'm on 64-bit Win 7, with a modern mid-range processor and GPU.

I'm unable to set the launcher.bat to run as administrator (option is greyed out).

Windows 7 64bit

After searching I found out how to create a shortcut and then set that shortcut to run as admin. However still nothing happens.

--- Problem solved --- I needed to set ntsleep.exe to run as admin not the bat file

Somehow while fixing this i've lost all my compatibility settings :(

By accident (since steam loads on startup for me) I discovered that just quitting steam fixes the mouse and audio stuttering issues for me.

Tried this repeatedly and it works for some unknown reason.

**I don't mean running Eador through steam. Just having steam minimised in the background is enough to screw up Eador.

Just purchased Eador: Genesis today and had those sound issues with the crackling noise so i shutdown Steam completely which in turn cured my sound problem for Eador.

And like you i dunno why i'm just happy to try the game without such problems now so thanks for mentioning it :)

Windows 7 64bit

On my system, I have multiple drives, and my old games go on an older drive (E:). I needed to modify the .bat file to accommodate this with

echo *******************************************************
echo Launching the game with NTSleep and waiting . . .
echo *******************************************************
E:
cd "\games\Eador - Genesis"
echo ****

For some reason, the .bat file was starting out on the C: drive.

I was having laggy mouse, laggy, jerky graphics and stuttering sound too. Like you, I found the problems went away when running the game via Ollydbg.

I'm guessing that you already know that alleg43.dll is Allegro 4.3, the open source game library.

I have an old game I wrote myself in Allegro 4 and recently I was playing around with it on Windows and I had certain graphical effects that ran abysmally slowly in a window, but were fine in full screen. (I tried changeing Eador to fullscreen in the ini file of course- it made no difference).

Since we have the source code of Allegro 4.3 it should be possible to profile the game, work out what's causing the slowdown, and tweak the source code of Allegro 4.3 to work.

I'll do it myself in a little over a week (or try to do it). I'd do it right now but I'm preparing for the 7 day roguelike game development competition which starts tomorrow.

Quitting steam fixes the lag somewhat, not a complete fix but very playable though i have no sound/music whilst playing. using the manual launcher here only opens the game in windowed mode. Also setting admin rights to ntsleep.exe works for me too not the .bat file in which the option was greyed out

edit: well I accidentally turned down the volume to 0 :| and i just figured out how to make the game fullscreen using the launcher here..my bad. only issue left is stuttering music. BTW i was playing using the launcher whilst steam is running too so i recommend trying this launcher, thanks!

I'm testing a tweak for the next version of the launcher; see edits. I'll post a new message once I get all of the findings sorted out.

--
I ran into sound/video lag issues with the v2 launcher on my Windows 7 64 laptop when under the Power Saver power plan. I was able to eliminate the issue entirely by changing the process priority of NtSleep.exe to High.

In launcher.bat, I modified the NtSleep.exe line to:

start /high /b NtSleep.exe /timer=2 "%~dp0Eador.exe"

Using start with /b prevents the extra command window from being opened for NtSleep.exe, leaving only the launcher window intact. It still closes automatically when the game is exited.

I had to remove Run as Administrator on NtSleep.exe and Eador.exe for this to work without additional tweaks, but it's better to limit Administrator access whenever possible anyway.

Edit 1: I have UAC enabled.

Edit 2: I have to set Poll mouse delay in Eador.cfg to 0 as well to make the mouse pointer smooth on my laptop.

Edit 3: I have some sporadic sound lag on my desktop, but using /belownormal instead of /high appears to fix it. I tested this on my laptop and experienced sound/video lag. Maybe a choice of high or belownormal priority for NtSleep.exe will be necessary?

I am extremely grateful for the fix which makes eador somewhat playable, although there is still plenty of stutters and music problems.

But someone, please tell me how gog.com is allowed to sell this piece of crap? I mean the game is unplayable on most newer OS and computers?

I just don't understand how there is no offical fix for this, I didn't pay a lot for the game, but this is a disgrace.

The whole point of gog.com is to make these issues go away for newer computers no? Why is there no backlash against gog.com? Yes we love the company and they do mostly right by us, but surely this cannot be acceptable?

@Crispin83

Do you have Steam resident on your PC?