This is the first of two guides on how to (hopefully) get Symphony to properly run on your PC if your CPU has more than 8 cores. Here, we will be employing the use of Special K to fix the game's incompatibility problems. According to the Special K Wiki:

"Lovingly referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of PC gaming, Special K does a bit of everything. It is best known for fixing and enhancing graphics, its many detailed performance analysis and correction mods, and a constantly growing palette of tools that solve a wide variety of issues affecting PC games."

Remember that PCs aren't all the same like consoles. What worked for me may not work for you. Still I will now explain what I did, in the hope that this will help somebody else who is being frustrated by this abandonware's refusal to start.

My System:

Windows 10 64bit
Intel Core i9 10900K (10 cores, 20 threads)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
LG 27 inch 1440p 144hz monitor 27GN850-B
2 TB SSD Hard Drive

Step 1:

Download Special K from here:

https://wiki.special-k.info/SpecialK/Local
https://discourse.differentk.fyi/t/download-special-k/1461

If you don't have them already, the first link will point you at the required 32-bit and 64-bit Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributables.



The second link will send you to a download of the actual program. You want the Stable Archive download as I won't be covering a full global install, only a local, game-specific one.



Step 2:

Open the SpecialK.7z file with an archiver program like 7-Zip[www.7-zip.org] and copy the SpecialK32.dll to the desktop. Right click it, select Rename and change it to d3d9.dll

Right click the desktop and select New > Text Document. Open it and copy this text to it:

[FrameRate.Control]
OverrideCPUCoreCount=8



YMMV based on the circumstances of your CPU. Despite its name, the OverrideCPUCoreCount command sets the amount of threads that the game runs on, not the cores. As long as you don't set the number to be more threads than are assigned to eight of your CPU's cores, the game should run properly.

For example, my CPU has 10 cores and 20 threads, two threads for every one core. If I set OverrideCPUCoreCount to 16, that accounts for 8 out of 10 CPU cores. If I change the setting to 18, the game breaks because that would be 9 cores in total.

You can see how many cores and threads (a.k.a. Logical processors), your CPU has by opening the Task Manager with CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, selecting the Performance tab and clicking on the CPU graph.

Let's get back on track. Save the text document and rename it to d3d9.ini and click yes at the prompt. Now you should have two files, d3d9.dll and d3d9.ini on your desktop.

Step 3:

Find the location of your game's folder. In this case, that would likely be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Symphony if you didn't change your default game library location. A simple way to find this folder is to open Steam, go to your game library, right click Symphony and select Manage > Browse local files. Copy the dxgi.dll and dxgi.ini files into this folder.



Once that is done, attempt to launch the game. If everything went the way it was supposed to, your game should successfully launch with Special K successfully injected into it. You will know because of the large grey box of text that slides in from above, explaining how to access SpecialK's interface.



The game now only pays attention to the number of CPUs you've selected in the dxgi.ini file. If you can now play the game without crashes, congratulations. Your long nightmare is over.

Cleaning Up:

1. You are free to get rid of any lingering files on your desktop, you don't need them anymore. If the gray box from Special K is an annoyance, follow its instructions to open the Special K Control Panel, expand the On Screen Display (OSD) drop down menu and set Show Startup Banner from 20.0 to 0. If you want to stop Special K's achievement notifications from appearing, open the Control Panel, go to Steam Enhancements and then Achievements. Uncheck the box by Play Sound, go into the Enhanced Popup menu and make sure that Draw Mode is set to Disabled.

Don't forget how to activate the interface if you need it. CTRL+SHIFT+BACKSPACE, or Menu+View/Start+Select on a controller.

2. These fixes will remain on your PC as long as you don't directly move or delete the relevant files, d3d9.dll and d3d9.ini. Deleting the game through Steam will not have an effect on them. The logs and the SK_Res folders will also survive deletion, but aren't necessary to get the game to run.

What you can do is copy these items to a backup drive, so you can have them on hand when the time comes to move to a new PC. Know that there's no guarantee that they will still work on a new OS, Processor, GPU, etc. That's just the nature of PC gaming.

Closing Thoughts:

This isn't the original method I used to play through the game, so I'm not quite as confident in vouching for it as I am with using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Tool. However, the time that I did spend playing the game this way didn't present any issues, and this is admittedly the much easier method of solving the problem (and a much easier guide for me to write, since I already did most of the work while writing for another game!)

That could just be great luck on my end, so take that as you will. I hope this helps someone out there.