posted 05-31-99 11:58 PM ET     

Here is a funny story (well, it would be funny, if it weren't so sad). Last weekend I spent five or six hours playing SMAC without any problems. During the week I installed Visual C++ (the only change to my computer). This weekend I killed five hours trying to make SMAC work again. I had the whole collection of problems happened randomly and repeatedly during these several hours:

-game spontaneously crashes;
-opening movie does not start, game returns to Windows;
- SP movies terminate the game and return me to desktop;
- Norton CrashGuard detects numerous "Terran.exe caused GPF in module terran.exe";
- you name it;

Actually, Norton was not even able to revive the program from any of the crashes. Games restarted after crash from Program Menu sometimes did not have sound. After reboot things seemed to go smoothly for a while, but only for a while. I had three or four different games saved (some of them were saved a turn before victory, some were in earlier stages), they crashed all within 10-15 turns.

I tried everything I read here (I'm checking the forums since March), including

-installing all patches (actually I was playing v.1.0 and didn't have any problems for almost two months);
-renaming sound.dll;
-changing ds3d=0 and eax=0;
-reinstalling DirectX several times;
-reinstalling the whole game.

Nothing really helped. Yes, Windows manages my swap files, yes I have about a 1Gig free space (actually, before installing C++ I cleaned the drive a bit, and unistalled CTP ), yes, I have the latest drivers for my system, and no, I don't overclock my good old Pentium 200MMX. And then, I had the game running just a week ago (and before that). So I don't think drivers or settings are really the problem.

I guess the problem is not in Visual C++ as such, but all Microsoft installators usually write a whole bunch of who-knows-what in system directory. Is it possible that it overwrote DirectX files or something like that?

And by the way. When I check processes in the memory after each crash, there is always hanging a file DDHELP.EXE, which I never have running in normal situation. I understand it's a part of DirectX, but why does it show up there only after crashes?

I didn't try to unistall Visual C++ yet, but then you never can completely uninstall monsters like that (it increased my registry alone by alsmost 1MB). At some point, I was seriously considering the idea of buying a separate computer for SMAC only (I wish I could ).

posted 06-01-99 04:24 PM ET            

jkm

posted 06-01-99 11:45 PM ET         

Sound actually never was a problem, but I did try to rename sound.dll. One game still crashed at the same spot (trying to move something automated), and another crashed trying to start an SP movie.

When I played without CD (i.e. movies), I obviously did not have SP movie-related problems, but that crash in the midlle of a turn still persisted.

My soundcard is Aztech Labs 3011, and I have Diamond Viper 550 for video. Both have the latest drivers (at least, the latest available from companies' websites). Dxdiag does say that my main display/video driver vprdrvle.drv is not MS certified, but I understand this is Diamond MM fault, not mine. All the tests in Dxdiag work just fine, and the game used to run great with this same diagnostics just a week ago.

What is weird, though, is that when I ran dxdiag after couple of SMAC crashes, it crashed itself trying to run those tests. And I mean the sequence:

-reinstall DirectX;
-run Dxdiag - everything OK;
-run SMAC - crash;
-run DxDiag - crash.

The message was something like "DxDiag caused GPF in module <unknown>" and the only "Unknown" module in the memory was that stupid DDHELP.EXE, which I mentioned earlier. I don't know how this thing starts, what initiates it, and whether it is a consequence of cause of crashes, but I know for sure that whenever I have a crash, it hangs in the memory.

Dim Cat
Craving for another sniff of fungus.

posted 06-02-99 10:22 AM ET            

jkm

posted 06-02-99 03:12 PM ET         

Dim Cat