DAOrigins.exe Large Address Awareness for Steam and other platform versions

Hallo dear community and hopefully also dear development staff,

this question is more of a plea or advice or a reminiscence about QA or user-friendliness endeavors in a wider sense.

I first stumbled across the possibility of setting a Large Address Aware Flag when searching for solutions for steady crashes in Fallout 3, some years ago. Fallout 3 however didn't benefit from setting this LAA Flag in my case. My issues were caused by graphic driver intricacies.

With Dragon Age a different common problem caught my attention, as I experienced it.

The community uses the phrase Memory Lags for it and that got me stuck on testing the possibility that the exact fix that didn't work for me in Fallout 3, might do something good here.

After some research I discovered several people's notes about the effects of Large Address Awareness on the DAOrigins.exe and the actual game experience. Most of these people stated they had significantly reduced slowdown as well as loading times and crashing behavior compared to the former case with unmodified .exe files.

I thought to myself: What the hell, why not just try it!? So I used CFF Explorer, set the LAA flag within the file header of my DAOrigins.exe and had to learn that the steam version of the game well differs from the retail-DVD-version that people who got this flag set and working must have had installed.

My first thought was that Steam was responsible for setting up the game loader that actually puts out Steam Error 51 when altering the .exe file and trying to execute it. I contacted Steam and in the end they revealed to me they were not authorized to create/change the program files they've been sent. EA was in charge for programming all the data they use.

In consequence I contacted the EA support and because they clearly don't possess the authority, too, that is needed to change the files sent to Steam and other platforms, I ended up here.

My suggestion for EA, that I still think of as worth doing, is to expand the hash values database of the loader/checker that is sent to Steam, etc. by exactly one value (that the DAOrigins.exe with LAA flag has) and to include the quasi-64-bit .exe into the package as optional file so people with platform versions of the game may try to avoid the Memory Lag problem by running this file.

As I said before: The retail version does work with LAA flag. It's just that the Steam loader won't start the game, because it has a hash value check present (most probably) that does not accept the different value that comes from flagging the DAOrigins.exe.

By the way: The support actually advised me to use the cmd command "bcdedit /set increaseuserva 2500".

An honorable suggestion brought forth to mediate, but sadly having an impact on every application that will be run by the OS and thus, in my opinion, being the less desirable option. That's why an OS has features like the LAA flag implemented into their structure.

I hope this does anyhow, anytime help anybody in the present of future. That's why I came up with suggesting it after all.

Best regards

D