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Topic on Talk:Mass Effect

Mass Effect on Steam, having to run Steam as admin

5
Todpullen2 (talkcontribs)

I discovered after installing ME1 via Steam that I only had to run Steam as administrator once, after that first time I started the game I could reset Steam back to its vanilla compatibility (not admin) and the game starts and runs fine (so far). Having Googled I found a few forum posts mentioning this, but most places (including this Wiki) seem to imply that you need to leave Steam with Admin permissions.

Anyone else found that you only need to start Steam as Admin once? Or the opposite that you need to leave it as Admin all the time you want to run Mass Effect ? Not sure this should be mentioned in the Wiki page if common, but some people may well prefer not to have Steam run as Admin all the time

Mirh (talkcontribs)

i can confirm this

Todpullen2 (talkcontribs)

OK I have added a small change to the main page, if anyone objects just reverse the edit. I have no idea what affects whether you need to have Steam as admin just once or all the time. If anyone finds out what makes the difference do let us know!

Mirh (talkcontribs)

probably, it need to set right files permission or write some entry in the windows registry

if you want to investigate further, i would suggest you to try regshot it's a nice program which compares windows registry before and after a determinate event

Mirh (talkcontribs)

ok, i had this problem again.. and after some investigations i found the issue
the game CAN'T load the physx runtime... if you change your MAC address!

yes, i'm talking exactly of that string that univocally identify your network device :|


it seems that IF the game find a "newer" network card which doesn't match the MAC address stored inside the enableLocalPhysXCore binary value at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\AGEIA Technologies (or if you are launching the game for the first time) the game simply refuse to load its own .dlls
instead it will look at C:\Program Files (x86)\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Engine\v2.7.2\, which will be empty, unless you also installed legacy PhysX.

so, you have 2 choice:

  • enter the windows registry and fix that entry (running the game as an admin automatically does the same thing)
  • or copying PhysXCore.dll from the MassEffect/Binaries folder to the physx one i have talked above


EDIT: with W10 default mac address randomization this gets even more messed up
EDIT2: more plot to the thing! It seems that every game patch/dlc installer contained a small VistaFirstRunFix.exe utility, extracted in %COMMONPROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Bioware\. Then, I'd guess it was easy as pieing running it with admin rights and doing whatever dirty fix explained above

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