Version 8.0 > version 8 system requirements

 


joel558
11/8/2013 8:20:00 AM
Hi all,

We are currently running SSP v7 at our church and have been since 2008. We now have approval to upgrade the computer that runs SSP, but I see the SSP website is all updated and changed for v8, but there is very little information about it and no info about its requirements. Can anyone tell me what the system requirements/recommendations are for SSP v8? I'd like to start speccing out a computer so it can be approved and purchased in a reasonable time so when v8 is released we can begin transitioning, but I don't want to recommend something that will be incompatible when SSP 8 is released (eg if I get Windows 8 and it only runs smoothly on Windows 7).

Since we don't have an active subscription I am unable to view the v8 forums or download the beta, so please don't move this thread to the v8 forums. (None of the updates since our subscription expired have been useful enough to our church for me to recommend an upgrade.) I tried emailing support a few weeks back but did not receive a reply.

Thanks,
Joel

osborn4
11/8/2013 2:22:45 PM
Hi Joel

The hardware requirements are the same from everything I've read. And, from what I understand, they are working to get it to run well on Windows 8 Pro, as well as Windows 7 Pro.

It's hard to go wrong with a good gaming system with a nVidia GeForce graphics card.

I've found that the more you spend on a machine up front, the longer it will be before it needs to be replaced.

StewartsNet
11/29/2013 7:36:09 PM
Hi Joel,

I was curious about the same things regarding SSP Version 8, so I did a little experimenting. Thought I'd post my results here for your consideration as well.

I'm running SSP Version 8 in workstation mode (Version 8.0 Preview Build 11/13/2013) on top of Windows 8.1 Professional with the Media Center Pack installed.

With SSP 8 up and running, I checked its resource usage via the Task Manager (CTL, ALT, DEL and select Task Manager)

The Task Manager indicated that SSP.exe is still a 32-bit application, using 0.1% CPU and 132.4 MB of memory (RAM)

Since Version 8 is still 32-bit, it enjoys (suffers) all the same memory limitations of 32-bit applications running on a 64-bit version of Windows. Since the advent of 64-bit versions of Windows, Microsoft has used WOW64, which is an x86 emulator allowing 32-bit applications to run on 64-bit Windows (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384249(v=vs.85).aspx). Given SSP 8 is 32-bit, next I wanted to see if it is "large address aware."

Why? If the application has the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag set in the image header, each 32-bit application receives 4 GB of virtual address space in the WOW64 environment. If the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag is not set, each 32-bit application receives 2 GB of virtual address space in the WOW64 environment. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384219(v=vs.85).aspx)

In order to see if SSP 8 was compiled in this manner, I ran a header dump as described here: http://superuser.com/questions/427837/memory-limit-for-32bit-application-on-64bit-windows-7

Here are the pertinent results:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC\bin>dumpbin /headers "C:\
Program Files (x86)\R-Technics\SongShow Plus 8.0\Bin\ssp.exe"
Microsoft (R) COFF/PE Dumper Version 12.00.21005.1
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


Dump of file C:\Program Files (x86)\R-Technics\SongShow Plus 8.0\Bin\ssp.exe

PE signature found

File Type: EXECUTABLE IMAGE

FILE HEADER VALUES
14C machine (x86)
C number of sections
5283CFB6 time date stamp Wed Nov 13 14:15:02 2013
0 file pointer to symbol table
0 number of symbols
E0 size of optional header
818E characteristics
Executable
Line numbers stripped
Symbols stripped
Bytes reversed
32 bit word machine

As the author describes in the link above, if SSP 8 is large address aware, the header dump just performed should contain the string "Application can handle large (>2GB) addresses." As you can see, it didn't, indicating that SSP 8 will generally be limited to 2 GB of memory (RAM).

In researching this issue, I came upon multiple articles about a utility created by Daniel Pistelli that "patches" non large file aware 32-bit executable files! As Daniel writes on his web page: "This little tool patches x86 executables in order to let them have 4GB (instead of only 2) of virtual memory on x64 platforms. This tool comes very handy for applications which need a great amount of virtual memory like games, 3D renderization, multimedia etc." This seemed like a good idea for SSP! You can download this tool and other resources here: http://ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php

After downloading the file, I patched the Version 8 executable (C:\Program Files (x86)\R-Technics\SongShow Plus 8.0\Bin\ssp.exe) and performed another header dump:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC\bin>dumpbin /headers "C:\
Program Files (x86)\R-Technics\SongShow Plus 8.0\Bin\ssp.exe"
Microsoft (R) COFF/PE Dumper Version 12.00.21005.1
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


Dump of file C:\Program Files (x86)\R-Technics\SongShow Plus 8.0\Bin\ssp.exe

PE signature found

File Type: EXECUTABLE IMAGE

FILE HEADER VALUES
14C machine (x86)
C number of sections
5283CFB6 time date stamp Wed Nov 13 14:15:02 2013
0 file pointer to symbol table
0 number of symbols
E0 size of optional header
81AE characteristics
Executable
Line numbers stripped
Symbols stripped
Application can handle large (>2GB) addresses
Bytes reversed
32 bit word machine

Wala! Daniel's utility added large addressing capability to the new program!

I plan on running the utility against the Version 7 SSP installation I have at the Church prior to this Sunday's worship and see if I notice any difference in performance etc.

So, to answer your original question much more concisely ;-) here are the HW requirements for SSP version 8:

Intel or AMD Dual Core Processor or better
4 GB of RAM for SSP 7 or SSP 8 if not "patched as described above
8 GB of RAM if patched
650MB of HDD space for install and much, much more for large SSP databases

Hope this helps.

Tim Stewart
Hazel River Assembly of God Church
Rixeyville, VA
http://www.hazelriver.org/


dreece
12/2/2013 12:03:07 PM
@Joel D:
Regarding system requirements: I apologize that this information isn't available yet (it's coming soon), but as Joel O. said above, version 8 doesn't add any requirements so what worked will a few years ago will still be sufficient. Version 8 does add background layering capability. If you use that feature to an extreme you'll tap your system out sooner than you would have with version 7. But just about any system designed to run with with Windows 8.x Pro today should be a sufficient system. And, we do recommend NVIVIA over ATI video cards for historical compatibility reasons. You should give the computers built by GoFishMedia serious consideration since these machines are designed specifically to run well with SongShow Plus and are being tested with version 8.0.

dreece
12/2/2013 12:16:52 PM
@Tim:
Interesting post, but please understand that we discourage any modification of any file that is installed as part of SongShow Plus. If you modify an file, please understand that we can not be responsible for problems that may result from those modifications. A little search on the web reveals that unless a program is tested with this flag enabled, you can't be sure that it will work properly with the flag set. As one example: I do know that some SongShow Plus code in the past has cast pointers to integers and back for compatibility with various C and COM calls. I can't be certain this code doesn't still exist.

Unless you find that you are loading so many things up with SongShow Plus at runtime that it is approaching the 2GB limit, there is no concern for you with the 2GB limit.

There is still a benefit to running 32-bit programs on 64-bit OSes, which is that you can run more applications at the same time before running out of system memory.

osborn4
12/2/2013 12:31:08 PM
How do you feel about the Optimus switching with nVidia GeForce 745M and Intel 4000?


dreece
12/2/2013 4:16:33 PM
We've only investigated it a bit on our end and don't have any hardware in-house that uses it. But my initial reaction is that it makes me feel uneasy for a production system. Better to keep the notebook plugged in so you don't need to worry about preserving battery life.

StewartsNet
12/2/2013 7:09:23 PM

Doug,


Understand completely.


Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft by day, so I fully understand software supportability concerns.


In the case of my church, I built the machine that SSP 7 (November 2012 update to May 2012 version) myself. 

Computer specs are as follows: 

  • Windows 8.1 Professional (64-bit) with Windows Media Center installed
  • Intel Core 2 Quad CPU - 2.4 GHz 
  • 8GB of DDR 3 Memory installed 
  • ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU with the September 19, 2013 drivers and Catalyst software 
  • 1 TB of HDD space with 862 GB free


We've repeatedly had SSP crash when transitioning from our countdown video to our praise and worship slides.  The computer itself doesn't crash at all, just SSP.  The display screen (and thus what the congregation sees) goes blank and the control display stops responding to mouse or keyboard inputs.  In the majority of cases, attempting to kill SSP via the Task Manager fails to kill the software, forcing me to reboot as our Praise and Worship folks are singing the first song during services.  As stated earlier, all other apps/functionality on the machine work properly. 

I've tried running SSP in compatibility mode (Windows 7) and with Run as Administrator turned on as well, again, to no avail.

After reading this and other forums, I turned off all start up processes not related to necessary Windows functionality as per your stated best practices.  Unfortunately, the problem persisted.  After the last crash, I called your tech support line, shared my system specs with the very nice lady that picked up my call and was told to set the multi-processor setting to allow use of multiprocessors and cores.  Again, this did not fix the problem, so I sought out other potential workarounds.  I asked her about the video card specifically and was told that as long as Windows supports the card drivers, it more than likely is not the issue.

Again, I understand your concerns regarding patching your software, but there is quite a bit of commentary on gaming blogs that the NTCore patch has fixed similar issues with 32-bit games running on 64-bit Windows versions dating back to Vista.  I've yet to apply the patch to our "production" machine at Church, but have applied it to both version 7 and version 8 ( Preview Build 11/13/2013) with no issues on my "staging" machine at the Church and my machine at home.

Thanks again, I hope you understand my sincere desire is simply to clear up the issues at Church, but also help you all understand with as much granularity as possible what I'm seeing here in "the field."

Blessings and Merry Christmas to you all!

Tim Stewart

Hazel River Assembly of God Church

http://www.hazelriver.org


dreece
12/2/2013 10:52:23 PM
Tim,

You didn't say what you do at Microsoft so I'll assume, for this discussion, that you are highly technical. If you are able to get SongShow Plus working using any highly technical means necessary, then that's fine by me. My point is that if you or anyone modifies the program in that way, it would then be problematic to ask our support team to further troubleshoot any problem with the software. (I'm sure the MS Office support team would feel the same way about patches made to that product.)

It sounds like you have a problem that is easily repeatable and causes the application to crash. I'm a bit frustrated that this hasn't been escalated to our tier three support team because we'd rather fix this problem than have patches out there like the one you recommended.

Also, you didn't mention the problem in your earlier post, so it is not clear to me if the patch actually fixes the problem. We are not aware of any scenarios like the one you described and yet we do all of our regular testing on 64-bit platforms now (we have been testing on Windows 8.1 since the RC). It's not clear to me why a flag letting SSP use >2GB of memory would fix a problem with a countdown video. It's also not clear to me if the problem you describe is only with SSP 7 or if it also occurs with SSP 8.

Anyway, I appreciate that you are taking an effort to get the software to work reliably for your church. We'd prefer to work directly with you on this problem. If this problem exists in SSP 8.0, then we'll contact you directly and try to get a repo on our end.

osborn4
12/3/2013 6:38:57 AM
Posted By Doug Reece on 02 Dec 2013 04:16 PM
We've only investigated it a bit on our end and don't have any hardware in-house that uses it. But my initial reaction is that it makes me feel uneasy for a production system. Better to keep the notebook plugged in so you don't need to worry about preserving battery life.
The Optimus can be turned off in the bios. And we have highway engineers here at work that insist that thier software (Autodesk) works better with it turned off, so I was wondering about that with SSP. Sounds like it might be a good idea.

And no, I don't ever project when running on battery. So that's not an issue.

Thanks.


hawkinbs
12/8/2013 8:42:57 AM
As mentioned by Tim Stewart:

We've repeatedly had SSP crash when transitioning from our announcement slideshows to our praise and worship slides (sometime hanfs inthe middle of the slidshow. The computer itself doesn't crash at all, just SSP. The display screen hangs and the control display stops responding to mouse or keyboard inputs. In the majority of cases, attempting to kill SSP via the Task Manager will work for us. All other apps/functionality on the machine work properly.

Also, when will version 8 be the recommended version to use.

We are running Windows 7 Ultimate (64-Bit) on a new Dell Precision T1650 with anNvidia Quadro K600 and 8GB RAM. (Had the same problem on our old workstation). SSP 7 is May 2012 build dated 11/15/2012.

Thanks,
Scott

osborn4
12/9/2013 10:10:57 AM
Quadro is not recommended for SSP. GeForce is what is recommended.

BUt I don't know if that would cause your problem.

I know that making sure the video drivers up to date has fixed problems for me on numerous occasions.

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