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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T11:08:25+00:00

This shakes my understanding of computers and operating systems on a level that makes

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This shakes my understanding of computers and operating systems on a level that makes me very uneasy. I have just spent about an hour entering different iterations of compile commands to g++ and in my exasperation I renamed the executable which kept having the delay from game.exe to gameg.exe and all of a sudden the problem vanished.

Here’s some more background: I was noticing recently that when I ran my Eclipse unit test build, when I start with an SDL enabled test it would open the SDL window and freeze for about 20 seconds before being able to get the test started. On subsequent tests (which call SDL_Quit() and re-initialize SDL as part of the test process) this delay is not present. Now I have ascertained that ONLY when the executable is named exactly “game.exe” does this happen! I rename it to any other filename and it goes along running tests happily, initializing the SDL system within a second like it usually does. I had assumed before that there must be some kind of bug that was causing my Eclipse build to have this behavior which wasn’t present in the makefile build, but it turns out if I take the eclipse build and rename its executable (the project folder it’s in is called game hence game.exe) it doesn’t exhibit the behavior.

Likewise I take my makefile build (whose filename is entropy_unittest_disp.exe fyi) and rename it to game.exe and it begins to do this. I rename it to game and it also does it (I am running from mingw’s bash.. when not with .exe extension, explorer doesn’t know it’s an executable). However I changed it to game.exx and it worked normally.

WHAT IS THIS BLACK MAGIC? Why should a program function differently depending on its filename??? I do query argv[0] and i actually do it to print to console its value (for debug purposes) but unsurprisingly it just prints the program and its path. No logic is ever performed on it in my program.

I tried to run GDB to find out where it is freezing but once I press Ctrl+C GDB simply exits.

does anybody have any idea what this might be caused by? A virus?

edit: I downloaded this demo from this site: http://www.sdltutorials.com/sdl-opengl-tutorial-basics/

extracted it, renamed the file to game.exe, and yup, same thing happens. WHAT IS THIS? I’m going to try running dependency walker next to see if something’s trying to hook into it.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m assuming you have either a AMD (ATI) or Nvidia graphics card with their official drivers.

    Chances are, game.exe is the executable name for an actual game released and your drivers are running special optimizations for the “game” or loading the Crossfire or SLI profiles for this game. A quick Google search seems to tell me that Resident Evil 4 calls their executable “game.exe.”

    I recommend taking a look at this link for further details as to what may be happening:

    http://www.kn00tcn.net/site/ati-catalyst-profiles/

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