Great post bro. I don't think this game will ever be completely forgotten, there are always players looking for help. I reposted this over in the "Trainer Crashing Game? SOLUTION HERE!" thread that has so many posts.
Thanks! it took awhile to sort through the all the solutions available to find one that was reliable.
Oooo... that looks good. I only recently upgraded to 8.1 and was a little disappointed at how unstable it was considering it ran damn near perfectly for me on Win7.
Thanks for this!
No problem Darksider. I hope it works as well for you as it did for me!
After spending hours trolling the internet and trying various fixes, I have finally gotten Fallout 3 to work reliably in Windows 8.1. Forget about downloading a dubious version of d3d9d.dll or some other file which may harm your machine. Gone are the days of having 5 different "Compatability" settings on various files in your Fallout 3 Folder. There is an easy 2 step process that I have found that works 99% of the time. Here they are in detail.
1. First you need to disable Games For Windows Live. In the past, this involved copying a hacked version of the "xlive" series of dll's to your Windows\syswow64 folder. Instead of this, use a nice little utility available on Nexus mods called "Games for Windows Live Disabler. Just download the file, run it and click the "Disable GFWL" button, and there you go. If you have the non-Steam version of the game, make sure to click the "move DLC" button also. Otherwise you will not see the DLC when you launch the game. You can find this nifty utility here: Link
2. The main reason why the game crashes on modern systems is that the game engine was not designed to run on more than 2 CPU cores. You can easily fix this by editing the fallout.ini file. It can be found in My Documents\My Games\Fallout3. Open the fallout.ini file in Notepad and look for the following line: bUseThreadedAI=0. Change the 0 to a 1. Then add this line right after the one you just edited: iNumHWThreads=2. This will limit the game to using only 2 CPU cores. If the game still crashes using 2 CPU cores, edit the line iNumHWThreads=2 to iNumHWThreads=1. This will limit the game to only using one CPU core.
Using the 2 fixes I have outlined, I have been able to play Fallout 3 for 4 hours straight on multiple occasions without any crashes or freezes. I hope this helps bring new life to this classic!
[Edited by linesma, 7/7/2015 4:55:11 AM]
UPDATE
I was asked if the above fixes work with DLC. I have just finished running both the retail (boxed) and the GOTY Steam versions with all the DLC enabled (4 hours each), and I am happy to report that the game plays like a dream.