That’s dedication for you. StarCraft 1.16.1 adds a CPU throttling option and fixes a couple issues. I think it’s incredible that even in the run-up to the Starcraft 2 trilogy, they’ve still got people hammering on decade-old code. Of course, it helps that about one trillion people play the game every day, most of them in Korea.
Here are the FTP download links for the update: Brood War and original flavor.
Yeah, I was surprised when I saw that this morning. Especially the bit about CPU throttling.
I mean, the game runs perfectly fine on a Pentium II 200 MHz, which is a joke these days. Even a netbook can run Starcraft with ease.
“Yeah, let’s put CPU throttling, Starcraft is such a demanding game!”
Seriously, who needs that? Sure, maybe back when the game was released, ten years ago. Today?…
I dunno, but it’s weird how games age… this great game ‘armed and dangerous’ broke because it would run at however fast it could go, so the game was sometimes at 30fps, sometimes 120fps, and time slowed down or sped up, pretty ridiculous.
@Mathieu,
I think the point is to make it not eat the entire CPU, since as you point out it doesn’t really need all of a modern CPU. It’d make laptops run cooler and quieter and longer if Starcraft could be kept from using 100% of the CPU all the time.
(That said, I’ve tried the patch, and the checkbox, and it doesn’t seem to substantially affect CPU utilization on my machine… hopefully others have better luck with it.)
All I have to say is….”Zug Zug!”
fwiw: my machine runs on a core2 duo (2.6ghz) and when I play starcraft with cpu-throttling disabled my cpu usage (on each core) bounces between 20% and 50%, but when I enable throttling the usage will just hover between 0% and 2%
Yeah, I have an AMD x3 and the cores runs like 0% to 2% too. W/o that thing checked 2 of my cores goes up. Jesus guys they know what the hell they’re doing give them some credits.
Sometimes Old games have weird compatibility issues with newer hardware.
It works!
No joke.
Fire up windows task manager, alt tab back and forth.
Now Starcraft (on a Q6600) will take up a core, leading to 20%+ usage.
That is without throttle.
With throttling, it turns down to 10% and lower.
Brilliant stuff blizzy. For sure, it’s every penny to support Starcraft2.