I contacted EA's Technical Support to find out whether 64 bit Vista was supported. After a lengthy wait (while Byron presumeably conferred with someone a little more in the know) he informed me that SPORE had not been tested on that OS but assured me if I had problems or issues with the game I could return it to EA at my expense and the would send a developmental copy when it became available.

Needless to say I was VERY disappointed in both the "Technical Support" representative's lack of product knowledge and the "solution" to my question.

I am VERY unhappy with EA's lack of training of their staff, their attitude, and most especially the terms of their registration of SPORE. I have generally had to reinstall my OS or perform system recovery at least three times on every system I've ever owned. The terms of the use of this game does not allow me to use a game I bought and paid for!

By the way, my son has been playing without problem using the 64 bit Vista OS... so far anyway. He's reached the space exploration stage and the game seems to be functioning within acceptable performance levels... again, so far.

It works just fine on the 64 bit.

Remember, not that many people (relatively speaking) have upgraded to 64 yet so I doubt it was high on their list of priorities.

Cheers.

I think we've all had our share of incompetent responses from tech support...

even though we shouldn't be

Yes, SPORE has worked in 64 bit Vista so far... We haven't has a single crash or problem that I'm aware of. My machine runs dual quad 6700s at 2.66GHz with 6GB RAM and a NVidea 9500 graphics card. I was afraid to install it on my older craptop because it barely meets the system requirements... and we all know how that would work out.

My complaint is that I had to grit my teeth, roll the dice and pray that it would work. EA's "Technical Support" was totally ineffective and completely unable to give me any assurances beyond informing me I would bear the cost of returning the game and wait an unknown length of time to receive a "developmental" copy. Very lame.

Been running with 0 crashes on my Vista 64 with an AMD 64 4000+ (2.4GHz), 2GB RAM, Nvidia 8600GT (1GB)

I have everything on high and have no problems.

i've found it's rare that something that is working fine in vista 32 bit has problems in 64 bit .. sometimes you need to run it in combatablity mode , but thats rare ..

what we don't see very often ( and i really hope this changes soon ) is smp compiled apps and games .. almost all of us have dual core or better processors , but almost nothing is compiled to use more than one ( and core balancing done via the os is very inefficient )

I've not had any trouble with Vista 64 and Spore (currently in space stage). Well, except that I can't run SLI and nvidia hasn't yet released a preliminary beta driver for GeForce 8800 x 64. Single card seems OK for the time being... Tech support? I'd guess that 4 out of 5 times, it's best to search for help elsewhere.

I'm running on 64-bit Vista right now and I can tell you that there has been very little crashing, maybe once or twice but so far the game and my system have been far more stable than they were on 32-bit, plus the sound drivers for my old SB Audigy 2 ZS work far better than they did before.

In fact may of your games will run just fine in Vista 64-bit even DosBox will. They'll get installed into Program Files(x86) for 32-bit apps and games but really you can install them anywhere and they'll run just fine.

And don't bother running Spore in elevated privilege mode, it's already elevated, and attempting to do so results in the "Missing SOCK.dll" error. The game will still run after you click ok on the error dialog about a dozen times but if you don't want to be clicking on that just run it without Admin.