StarCraft Power Saver 0.2 released

Version 0.2 of StarCraft Power Saver fixes a problem with checking StarCraft executables that made it unable to patch some of them. If you had trouble with version 0.1 please try version 0.2, which is available from the StarCraft Power Saver web page. If you have any questions or concerns about StarCraft Power Saver, feel free to add them as a comment to this post.

Thanks to everyone who added information about their StarCraft executables on my previous post.

10 Responses to “StarCraft Power Saver 0.2 released”


  • it worked perfectly.(sorry for posting on the wrong page)

    thank you so much

  • yue_W wrote (on StarCraft Power Saver needs your help):

    thanks for StarCraft Power Saver 0.2.

    It worked perfectly(played it for 5 mins). Though during the menu part, its still near 100%. I guess it was designed that way.

    That’s a good point. StarCraft Power Saver only reduces CPU usage in-game. The menus, victory/defeat screens, game setup screens, etc. still use all the CPU power available.

    This is because I have only added a wait to the main game loop, which is used in-game. I have not added waits to the menu loops. I might do this if there is enough demand.

    I do kind of feel its just a little less responsive for me. maybe a later option for user to tweak it? a forum page to comment?

    The way StarCraft Power Saver is currently implemented (using Windows’ Sleep function), it is using the smallest delay possible. For Windows NT-derived OSes (like Windows 2000 and XP), Sleep delays for at least 10-15ms. For DOS-based Windows (like 95, 98, and Me), Sleep can delay for as little as 1-5ms.

    Windows NT-derived OSes can Sleep for less than 10-15ms, but that requires a call to timeBeginPeriod, which requires linking against winmm. Doing this linking with StarCraft seems like it would be a significant amount of work (please tell me if you know how to do this easily). So I am not likely to implement this mechanism. For more on this, see Timing in Win32.

    An alternative is to delay on every second or third game loop iteration instead of on every iteration. This would still take some work, but is feasible. That may alleviate the game lag, but it’s not as clean a solution as using timeBeginPeriod.

    I may setup a forum for StarCraft Power Saver eventually. Much of the current discussions are happening on the TeamLiquid forums, on the GosuGamers forums, and on the ICCup forums. I’m not sure that the volume of discussion on StarCraft Power Saver warrants its own forum; commenting on my blog posts should suffice for now.

    best regards

    thank you so much for doing this.

    I appreciate the feedback. It helps guide the direction of future development.

    It’s great to hear from people that this has helped. Please spread the word to others that you think would like to use it.

  • It’s work fine in 1.5.2, why not to devolope it for 1.08b.

  • ewe wrote:

    It’s work fine in 1.5.2, why not to devolope it for 1.08b.

    I don’t think it would be worth the effort. Almost all StarCraft users run the latest version of StarCraft and so I made sure StarCraft Power Saver worked with 1.15.2. It would be a lot of work to make StarCraft Power Saver work with version 1.08b and few people use that version.

  • o, I see, thanks. I knen a lot of people play RPG in 1.08b in china.

  • Starcraft is my favorite game. I have 4 computers with Starcraft on them and they get used often. The only problem I have with Starcraft is that the CPU is always maxed out at 100% when playing. This generates a good amount of heat not to mention the wear and tear on the processor and fan. Starcraft Power Saver fixed this problem. I installed the patch on all 4 of the computers and have had no problems at all with the games. The CPU percentages on the computers is about 7% on all of them. The computers and room stay cool now. I love the Starcraft Power Saver patch.
    Thak you for developing such a great patch.
    Terry

  • StarCraft has a new patch released, can you make a new version for us, Thanks very much.

  • Thanks for letting me know, IceKing. I have updated StarCraft Power Saver to patch 1.15.3 executables. The new version is on the StarCraft Power Saver website:

    http://ossguy.com/starcraft_power_saver/

  • StarCraft released 1.16 patch, that solve the cpu issue, thanks for doing hard work long time.

  • Thanks for letting me know about this. I had previously encountered this when looking into updating StarCraft Power Saver for 1.16.0: http://ossguy.com/?p=121#comment-1847. I have added a note to the StarCraft Power Saver web page about it.

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