As I noted on Monday, there’s a great sale on Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (SMAC) with the Alien Crossfire (SMAX) expansion at GOG right now. After finishing my first campaign of the original game this morning, I wanted to fire up Alien Crossfire to have a go at a campaign with one of the expansion factions. I quickly discovered that SMAX crashes when run on Windows 11. Apparently, the expansion version of the game (unlike the original SMAC) accesses some unitialised memory, most likely to feed this into a pseudo-random number generator as a seed value. Unfortunately, the 24H2 update for Windows 11 prohibits this kind of memory access for security reasons, which means SMAX crashes when it tries to process the first (or any) turn of the game.

This issue is fixed in the Thinker mod for Alien Crossfire, but this mod changes many things about this game and I prefer the PRACX mod that ships with the game version you can get from GOG. This led me to try Nathan Baggs’ Adamite tool. When you run it, you can drag your Alien Crossfire executable into its window and it will spit out an EXE with a _nb appended to its name, which then works on up-to-date Windows 11 systems. Nathan says that his fix isn’t as good as the one from the Thinker folks, because it probably messes with whatever that pseudo-random number generator does — most likely randomising the new environmental effects that are part of SMAX — but it has been working great for me so far. You can drag both the expansion’s original terranx.exe as well as the PRACX-patched terranx_PRACX.exe that GOG ships into Adamite and the _nb versions will both work. If you get a warning about the file’s hash not matching up, you can ignore this, it will work regardless. Until GOG gets its game version fixed, I am happy I can play SMAX this way! 🥰

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