posted 02-25-99 08:15 AM ET        

I purchased SMAC Sunday 'cause I needed a break from doing taxes and had enjoyed Civ & Civ2. It looks like a really neat game but terran.exe would crash every 2 or 3 turns. So, I checked out your web site Tuesday and downloaded the 2.0 patch. Bad Idea. Not only did terrane.exe still crash often, but I had a new problem... During a turn, last night, Win95 pops up a message that my Registry had a problem and I needed to re-boot. To make a long story short, somehow BOTH the working and backup copy of the Registry had been corrupted. I was not amused.

I built this system a couple of years ago. It has a P150+ with 32 meg ram a Matrox Millennium vidio card and a Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card. I was running under Win95 SP-1. I also have Linux and DOS 6.22/Win3.11 on the system, but the drive is partitioned so that no OS can even see the others partitions. Everyting was working fine untill I installed SMAC.

I do Windows programming at work (engineering applications on NT, not games) using SQLWindows, C/C++ and FORTRAN. I know what a house of cards the Windows architecture is, so I feel your pain.

I suspect that I could have a problem with the sound drivers, judging from other messages. Do you guys have any ideas?

posted 02-25-99 11:24 AM ET            

jkm

posted 02-25-99 11:52 AM ET            

I have about 500 MB free on that partition so free space should not be a problem. The last time I ran DxDiag (which was admittedly after a 5.something DirectX install for another game) everything was fine. As the problem seemed to be isolated to terran.exe I tried your 2.0 patch (and the wheels fell off) before I thought to consider a DirectX issue. I reinstalled Win95 and got my system back up last night and started SMAC, but terran.exe died after about 30 seconds. Sigh... gawd how I love Windows!

I have downloaded some new sound and vidio drivers and will try them. BTW, I also have DirectX 6.1 files. Would it a good idea to install that or not??

posted 02-25-99 01:02 PM ET            

jkm

posted 02-25-99 01:44 PM ET            

Beep Beep Zoom...

Now that you mention it, HIMEM did whine about a memory error when I booted DOS to check that OS last night. The error went away on re-boot and Win95 or Linux didn't see any problems so I didn't think too much about it. Lately, as far as games go, I had been playing Steel Panthers under DOS with no problems. I was using Win95 to run TaxCut also with no problems. It seems too much of a coinsidence that a SIMM would pick the exact time that I installed SMAC to go south, but I guess that it could happen. I will pull my memory and check it out. I needed a good excuse to upgrade to 64mb anyway.

L8r
Todd

posted 02-26-99 07:34 AM ET            

I think that I have solved my problem and it wasn't anything that I had seen in this forum. My Matrox Millennium vidio card does hardware graphics acceleration (common), but did not have a hardware interrupt assigned to it. I am not exactly sure why as it is a PCI plug & play card. Anyway, after adding an IRQ for the vidio card, I played the game for about two hours and no crashes.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Jeff...

I suspect that sound functions were "rudely" interrupting a vidio function causing the terran.exe crash. That may be why some people are able to avoid a crash by disabling sound. Even with no IRQ, my system passes all of the tests in DxDiag. You might want to add this to your bag of tricks for troubleshooting 'cause it's not an obvious problem.

Thanks for your help on this.