No doubt Jade would be unimpressed with her treatment

Sometimes publishers don’t bother updating old games before they put them on Steam. They just upload and watch the money come in, ignoring the complaints as the game fails to run optimally on modern systems.

Ubisoft sure screwed Beyond Good and Evil up in this fashion, from texture issues, to performance problems, to audio synch screw ups. The fact that they sell this broken version on both Steam and GoodOldGames is appalling. Thankfully there’s a few steps you can take to make things friendlier, but you’ll have to accept lower graphical detail and some textures, like the moon in the sky, will always flicker.

Firstly, if the game claims it’s not installed properly, you’ll need to edit the registry.

1. Run regedit.
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ubisoft\Beyond Good & Evil. If the key doesn’t exist, create it.
3. Create a new String Value and call it Install Path. Set the value to where Beyond Good and Evil is installed (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil).
4. Restart Steam and the game should now launch settings application.

If it’s loading the game, here’s how to fix some of the performance issues:

1. Run the SettingsApplication.exe file from Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil. Select the Advanced Settings tab.
2. Check Manual compatibility settings. Deselect HW Vertex Processing, Fastflip and Triple-buffering. This should fix the majority of graphical glitches, although comes at the cost of slowdown. You’ll still get the occasional texture flicker.
3. If you own an Nvidia card, move the Water detail slider to Low to fix the performance issues in the city. Setting Shadows quality to Low and Antialiasing to Off should also help the overall game. These settings should run the game comfortably on a GeForce GTX 275.
   

   Yes, against all your better judgement, you need to turn things down or off.

4. If you own an ATI card, things aren’t quite as rough, although you will be nagged at every launch about out of date drivers. You’ll need to take AA down a couple of notches so particles don’t slow the game down, but in testing a Radeon HD 5870 handled the game fine with the AA dialed back two notches at 2560×1600.
   

   ATI users are a bit better off, but will get nagged about driver updates at every launch.

5. If you have a multicore PC, you may experience audio synch issues. To fix, upon running the game Alt+Tab out and invoke Windows Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Go to the Processes tab, select BGE.exe,  right click and choose Set Affinity. Deselect everything except CPU 0. Return to the game and begin playing.
   

   Setting affinity for BGE.exe

If you don’t want to set affinity every time you run Beyond Good and Evil, you can modify the .exe using a program called ImageCFG.

1. You’ll need to first right click on the Beyond Good and Evil entry in Steam, and choose Properties and then hit the Updates tab. Select Do not automatically update this game and click Close.
2. Download ImageCFG and copy it into your Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil folder.
3. Open up a Command Prompt, browse to the above directory and use the following commands:

imagecfg -u bge.exe
imagecfg -a 0x1 bge.exe

The first command modifies the .exe to be uniprocessor only, the second defines the core affinity it should run on; in this case it’s been associated with CPU 0.

Using ImageCFG to modify BGE.exe to single core.

Enjoy this stylish and excellent old game.