Slow down my pc code needed

To be honest. I've got dome flash games which I'd like to slow down :o)

Thats simple! Install Mcafee AntiVirus:P

hehehe :)  Norton is even worse!

I need some code though :o)

Sorry. I suppose you could write a program that hogs the CPU however you will not be able to control how and when the OS doles out the clock cycles. I would suggest looking more in the direction of Operating System tweaks rather that trying to write something.

 I think I would try installing a virtual machine.  On a virtual machine you can set how much memory it has access to, etc.  Once it is running in a virtual OS under Windows, you can find the process it is running under and lower it's priority.  This would at least give you more options to play with in the process of slowing it down.  As a side benefit, any other flash games you want to play could be run in the same environment, and anything running in the main OS would still be able to operate at near normal speeds (minus the memory, processor time, etc for the virtual machine).

Just a thought.

Hmm, Cheat Engine(google it) has a function which allows slowing a process down. From what I know it injects a dll into the process. You can download the source to it yourself and find out but it seems to hook some timing functions such as QueryPerformanceCounter.

Hmm..I cannot find any links to the source code :o(

What about making my pc think it's low on memory, would that slow it down?

ST3V0,

I have not tried this, but this delay code does consume a bunch of CPU time/cycles. It "could" slow things down enough for you, but it is a delay loop with Application.ProcessMessages.

You might put it in a separate executable and keep it running (change the thing to suit your needs so it runs forever until you Stop it via Stop which is a global variable and is set True.

I don't know....

John

Procedure Delay(MSecs: Cardinal);
var
 FirstTick, CurrentTick : Cardinal;
 Done : Boolean;
begin
 Done := FALSE;
 FirstTick := GetTickCount;
 While Not Done do
  begin
   Application.ProcessMessages;
   If Stop then
    Done := True;
   CurrentTick := GetTickCount;
   If Int64(CurrentTick) - Int64(FirstTick) < 0 Then
    begin
     If CurrentTick >= (Int64(FirstTick) - High(Cardinal) + MSecs) Then
      Done := TRUE;
       End
        Else
         If CurrentTick - FirstTick >= MSecs Then
          Done := TRUE;
  end;
end;

                                              

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http://www.cheatengine.org/downloads/CheatEngine54src.rar

Look at CEHook folder specifically speedhack.pas

Hi Johnjces....Tested it and set it to 2 MSecs and I see no slowing down at all.

ThievingSex, I've checked the source and it's in delphi and C++ ... so I won't be able to compile the code I guess :o(

The code you want is in delphi. If you just want to have an application that does something like this download the compiled cheat engine. Otherwise either extract the code from speedhack.pas and use that or recreate the concept.

ST3V0

You need to set it for like 60 seconds to see anything appreciable. During this 60 second or longer time frame is when you need to test your game. You need a looooong loop.

2 msecs will just exit in like in 2 msecs.

John

Would it be better to call it from inside a TTimer?

No, to test it, I'd just make a simple exe file with two buttons. One Go one Stop.

Set the delay to like 120000... should be 2 minutes. (Math is NOT my forte)!

In the go button event do Delay(120000).

The stop button should have a Stop := True. Make sure you have a var; Stop : Boolean;

Click Go run your game. See if its slower since this delay will eat CPU time.

It may not do much if anything perceivable, but could slow ya down a bit.

John

Well, on record with the first post. I have personally used Cheat Engine itself to slow down flash games to attain a higher score.

Hi TheivingSix,

I'm not saying that it doesn't work, it's just that I want to try to have my own app to do this.

I understand, and the source for it is readily available in delphi code.

why not set the process priority to LOW?!?

Hi Johnjces, your code takes 50% cpu but it's not enough to slow down the browser...need a bit more!

Hmmm.... how about putting more of those delay routines in threads.

Other than that, I'm certainly out of thoughts!

John

I've actually tried loading the code twice, basically by creating another instance of the code and renaming it.
Then, calling it twice and still at 50 or 52 % max.

ST3V0,

You come up with the good Q's!!!

I don't know. If you really want to write something in a Delphi app, the only other thing I could think of would be a combination of the above and "maybe" doing a search of the hard drive for some file or text in a file. This would waste some hard drive read/ write cycles as well as some more CPU time.

On my website I have a GUI find in file text search program. Search form some fairly long non-existent string in all files starting in your root C drive.

You may have start up the delay too.

http://www.jcitssystems.com/FileSearch.htm

So... I'm out of thoughts!

John

If your trying to slow down an application/process (vs the whole PC), then one idea might be to control the Suspend/Resume of the main thread in order to "slow" the process down. Example below, assuming you don't mind starting the process via your app ( you could also use OpenProcess to get a handle to the process).

Russell

----
function CreateSlowProcessThread(lpProcessInfo: PProcessInformation): DWORD; stdcall;
var  dwIndex:       Integer;
begin

  // Pacify the compiler
  result:=0;

  // Resource protection
  try
     // Resume thread
     ResumeThread(lpProcessInfo^.hThread);
     // While the thread is running
     while (WaitForSingleObject(lpProcessInfo^.hProcess, 0) = WAIT_TIMEOUT) do
     begin
        // Suspend / resume four times per second to smooth things out
        for dwIndex:=0 to 3 do
        begin
           // Suspend the process thread
           SuspendThread(lpProcessInfo^.hThread);
           // Delay
           Sleep(Trunc(lpProcessInfo^.dwProcessId / 4));
           // Resume the thread
           ResumeThread(lpProcessInfo^.hThread);
           // Delay
           Sleep(Trunc(lpProcessInfo^.dwThreadId / 4));
        end;
     end;
  finally
     // Close handles
     CloseHandle(lpProcessInfo^.hProcess);
     CloseHandle(lpProcessInfo^.hThread);
  end;

end;

procedure CreateSlowProcess(Command: String; SlowDownPct: Integer);
var  lpPi:          PProcessInformation;
     lpSi:          TStartupInfo;
     lpMsg:         TMsg;
     dwThread:      DWORD;
     hWait:         Array [0..0] of THandle;
begin

  // Clear startup info param
  FillChar(lpSi, SizeOf(lpSi), 0);

  // Set startup param info
  lpSi.cb:=SizeOf(lpSi);
  lpSi.dwFlags:=STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW;
  lpSi.wShowWindow:=SW_SHOWNORMAL;

  // Allocate memory for process info
  lpPi:=AllocMem(SizeOf(TProcessInformation));

  // Resource protection
  try
     // Call createprocess to run the bootstrap version of the program
     if CreateProcess(nil, PChar(Command), nil, nil, True, CREATE_SUSPENDED or IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS, nil, nil, lpSi, lpPi^) then
     begin
        // Set thread priority
        SetThreadPriority(lpPi^.hThread, THREAD_PRIORITY_IDLE);
        // Use dword values in structure to save wait and run times
        lpPi^.dwProcessId:=Trunc(1000 * (SlowDownPct / 100));
        lpPi^.dwThreadId:=1000 - lpPi.dwProcessId;
        // Create thread to run
        hWait[0]:=CreateThread(nil, 0, @CreateSlowProcessThread, lpPi, 0, dwThread);
        // Check handle
        if (hWait[0] > 0) then
        begin
           // Resource protection
           try
              // Wait for the secondary thread to complete
              while (MsgWaitForMultipleObjects(1, hWait, False, INFINITE, QS_ALLINPUT) = (WAIT_OBJECT_0 + 1)) do
              begin
                 // Handle waiting messages
                 while PeekMessage(lpMsg, 0, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE) do
                 begin
                    // Translate and dispatch
                    TranslateMessage(lpMsg);
                    DispatchMessage(lpMsg);
                 end;
              end;
           finally
              // Close the handle
              CloseHandle(hWait[0]);
           end;
        end;
     end;
  finally
     // Free memory
     FreeMem(lpPi);
  end;

end;


---- example usage ----

  // Start a directory listing throttled down by 75%
  CreateSlowProcess('cmd /k  dir c:\ /s', 75);

Intresting but everything is still going fast :o(

What about my low priority idea?

The only solution that will offer a precise way to slow down a process would be to inject a dll that hooks QueryPerformanceCounter(), timeGetTime(), and GetTickCount(). A flash game uses these function exclusively when timing it's frames per second. Plus, the source is readily available.

aikimark, about your idea, do you mean via a TTimer?

ThievingSix: ref: Plus, the source is readily available....where?

thanks again!

@ST3VO

Do it by hand first -- Task Manager; right mouse click; Set Priority

If that works, you can set your priority programmatically.  If running with admin privileges, you can set any process's priority.  Otherwise, you can set your own process priority and anything your process spawns.