pmiranda Posted December 23, 2000 Share Posted December 23, 2000 Thanks for your help, Schrullenhaft, but there is no way I can make CM work on my system: it freezes 3 times out of 4. P. Miranda 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Madmatt Posted December 23, 2000 Share Posted December 23, 2000 Pmiranda, I have gone back and looked over your earlier messages and have tried to think of what might be causing this. Your system is identical to one I have here (motherboard, SB Live but I have a Diamond V7700 TNT) and it has never given me a lick of trouble. I notice that you have a lot of IRQ sharing but I am not sure that would cause crashes, more likely you would notice pauses in the video playback if anything. Have you tried a step by step approach to the possible hardware conflicts? What I mean, and I understand this can be tiresome to do repeatedly, is to take out all the cards in your system except the video card. Pull out the sound card and the NIC card and anything else in there. Now try and launch the game. Make sure you are running v1.05 as none of the newer Public Betas will work without a soundcard. See if the game lockups on you. Since your crashes are already so intermittent you will want to run several tests to see if its going to stay up or not. If you are satisfied that the game is running okay, then put each board back in one at a time and repeat the tests. If the game starts to lockup again on you it should become obvious which card (if any) is causing the conflict. At that point you will need to start swapping PCI slots with the cards and see if you can get them all to be installed and not cause problems. Which OS are you running? I didn't ever see that mentioned anywhere in your message. Also you said you have similar issue with other games as well or did I read that wrong? If you do then you may have a power voltage issue. Some of the older Asus P2B series had this problem (not enough or consistent power to the AGP/PCI slots) but there may not be any solution that will work, aside from getting a newer motherboard since you already upgraded your Bioses across the board. There is always the more extreme option of re-installing Windows but to do this right and leave no vestiges of the older copy you need to not only delete your whole Windows folder (which can take upwards of an hour when done from DOS) but also the hidden registry files System.dat and User.dat and there backups System.da0 and User.da0 which you will need to run "attrib" on. You can find info on the web on the best way to completely un-install/re-install Windows. I can understand if the above all seems like too much to go through just for the sake of a game, but if you have these sorts of problems with other programs then there is a problem and a step by step approach to troubleshooting is the only way to get to the bottom of it. Let me know if you need more help and I will do what I can. Madmatt 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 23, 2000 Share Posted December 23, 2000 What kind of wattage is your power supply ? If it is 230 - 250 Watts, you may want to try out a 300 Watt model. I have no idea if this will help with your problem or not. Do you have lockup problems with any other games ? Did you ever get your SB Live card to use another IRQ other than the one that your video card was using ? Although the BETAs would be more likely to actually drop to the desktop with any incompatibility they run into - have you tried any of them lately ? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmiranda Posted December 28, 2000 Author Share Posted December 28, 2000 Sorry, guys, but I have Project IGI (which is heavily 3D-accelerated) running just fine on my PC. I must assume something is wrong in CM's code, then. Maybe the next patch will fix it, who knows? It MAY be a voltage problem, but I have no idea how to modify that on my card (the manual is terrible, and I HATE having to start messing around with jumpers and that sort of thing). Besides, how could it be that it works fine otherwise? Thanks for your help, but that's getting all too technical for a simple player like me... I'll just reinstall CM on my new PC when I upgrade... and pray! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug Beman Posted December 28, 2000 Share Posted December 28, 2000 pmiranda, I was in your boat, and at first decided it was CM's fault but have now decided differently. When I installed the original Beta Demo over a year ago on my Celeron system w/ Monster2 video card, I experienced black screens, and after I fixed those (driver issue) experienced periodic lockups. After upgrading my video card to a decent TNT1-based card (something I had been planning to do anyway, and I got a GREAT deal on the card by buying a 19" monitor at the same time) the Beta Demo ran fine, and so did the full version. After buying a new PC in August (Thunderbird and Asus GeForce card) CM would NOT run. I got graphics corruptions, freezes, blue screens. The PC manufacturer determined that, for some reason, the Asus card wasn't playing nice with the mobo in ANY 3D app, but couldn't straighten it out. They put in a Matrox card instead, which alleviated the problems but didn't fix them. After a month of screwing around with drivers, BIOSes, and even which-card-goes-where I told them to rip out the Tbird chip and mobo and put in a P3 solution (I lost money on the deal, cause by then chip prices were so low I should have gotten a credit). I can now play CM for hours on end without a single snafu. pmiranda, I am confident that dozens upon dozens of people have systems that are identical to yours, and unless they're suffering in silence they're having no problems. As complex and irritable as PCs are it's my bet that one little setting somewhere is off, or there's a registry-level problem (some little chunk of a previous driver still around somewhere) or maybe there's a problem between mobo and video card, some system call that IGI doesn't make that CM does. I don't mean any offense by this post, and I hope you can get a new PC as soon as possible. But there are so many things about PCs that most of us take for granted (who said "at its highest, technology becomes indistuingishable from magic"?) but that only a small % really understand. DjB [This message has been edited by Doug Beman (edited 12-28-2000).] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cubes Posted December 28, 2000 Share Posted December 28, 2000 Pmiranda, i was wondering if you are getting VXD errors or blue screen lockups ? Geoff 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmiranda Posted December 29, 2000 Author Share Posted December 29, 2000 Thanks for your input. I suppose there is something wrong with my motherboard / video card combination. The problem is: when I upgrade, what reliable solution should I buy? Regarding the problem, I don't experience blue screens. The game just freezes and some graphical bugs appear. I have the latest drivers for both my BIOS, video card, network card and sound card + the only IRQ shared is by my network card and my video card (and there is nothing I can do about it, anyway, it's not supposed to be a problem). 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug Beman Posted January 2, 2001 Share Posted January 2, 2001 Your upgrade options depend on your budget and your brand loyalty, if any. If you want a solution that is almost 100% sure to work, I suggest a Pentium3 chip, maybe 733 or 800, riding in the Asus CUV4X or P3V4X motherboard. These boards are ALWAYS highly reviewed. For video card, the budget solution would be, if you can find it, an AGP TNT2 card. The regular $$ solution would be almost any GeForce1 card (Asus and Leadtek are recognized leaders). The highend solution is a GeForce2 card. If you want even more bang/buck, you can go with an AMD Thunderbird CPU on almost any VIA KT133 motherboard. However, there are still some anomalies with this CPU/mobo combo (as I experienced) and certain 3D cards. If you're on for this, then you should have enough leftover cash for either the GeForce2 or, possibly, a GeForce2 Ultra. Good luck. DjB 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug Beman Posted January 2, 2001 Share Posted January 2, 2001 Check sites like sharkyextreme.com, tomshardware.com, and gamespot.com (they've made the hardware section almost invisible; I can only find the UK version, at http://www.gamespot.co.uk/pc.gamespot/hardware/ ) DjB 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L.Tankersley Posted January 2, 2001 Share Posted January 2, 2001 <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Doug Beman: (who said "at its highest, technology becomes indistuingishable from magic"?)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Arthur C. Clarke. ------------------ Leland J. Tankersley 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doug Beman Posted January 2, 2001 Share Posted January 2, 2001 Thankya. DjB 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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