A possible answer for those with trouble running SPQR.

[saienga]

And by "trouble running", I mean "the program doesn't launch at all, and I just stare at my desktop going...what happened?"

If anybody else has had the specific problem I'm about to explain, I have your specific solution.

Problem:
You run Rome.exe and nothing seems to happen. The computer will think for a few seconds, but then...nothing.
Then, because, why not?, you run Rome.exe again, and SQPR comes up, but the performance is poor. You get stutters in the opening video, and unexplained framerate dropouts in-game.

Solution:
Kill Rundll32

I run Win 7 Home Ultimate, and from time to time, when I run Rome (or a variety of other older .exes) they won't start. I've discovered this guy to be the culprit:


See Rundll32?

The solution works in this order.
With the task manager open, and the processes tab selected, and the processes itemized by CPU usage (as in the screen grab) Rundll32 will stay at the top of the list. It hogs 75-90% of your CPU.
Now, run your Rome.exe again.
When RomeTW (or whatever) pops up in the processes list, hit "End Process" for Rundll32.
Alternately, you can just wait until your game starts up completely, then alt+tab out and kill Rundll32.

I've found that if you kill Rundll32 before running the second instance of the game, Rundll32 just starts right back up.

If anybody knows of some stupid, simple fix for this problem that I haven't found, holler...but it just struck me today that this might answer some of the random threads talking about how SPQR won't start up, or doesn't run right.

[lt1956]

64bit OS's dont work well with the older games, BASICALLY that is why I am sticking to the Old WinXp, the only games needing more Memory and Quad core are all the consolized games, and I can live without them, but I cant live without SPQR and the rest of my OLD FUN collection of games. ;-)

Hope you find a better fix I here some have found other ways but to be honest this happens everytime they do a major change, in this case going to Win 7 vista was bad enough but really have an older system before they are gone for the older games!

[saienga]

Well, personally, I'm holding out for somebody to make a box-within-a-box environment to emulate Win95 and maybe Win2000 for some of the older stuff.
I use DOSBox for a bunch of my oldy-oldies, and it works great...but it doesn't run that first generation of games that went, "Hey, we can customize this to run in the windows environment!"
So installers for windows hang things up, and I haven't found a good work-around.
I really haven't had any trouble with SPQR at all, beside this one random tick, and it happens with all of my early '00s games. And, as demonstrated in the OP, I can kind of fix that.