Problem with CM locking up

[Edward]

Hello. I'm running CM and the PC locks up after 5 min of game play. The CM audio keeps on working fine. This happens random for 1 of evey 3 games. There is no way of getting out, not even Ctrl-alt-del. I have then to reset the PC.

I'm using a brand new system:

Windows 2000

P3 667 (133htz)

AOpen AX64Pro motherboard (with built in audio)

Creative Gforce GTS2

128 MB 133htz

I have updated my drivers for video and motherboard to the latest in the net. The mouse driver has been selected by default by win 2000.

Is there anyone that might have experience with this problem?

Thanks in advance

Edward

[Schrullenhaft]

The problem most people have with Windows 2000 is graphics related, but it doesn't usually produce lockups.

What audio chip do you have on your motherboard ? Have you checked to see what the latest drivers for it are under Win2K ?

I'm not sure if you've updated your BIOS or not. There is something in the latest BIOS (R 1.05) that is directly applicable to your setup:

AOpen AX64Pro BIOS (R 1.05):

http://www.aopen.com.tw/tech/download/mbbios/ax64pro.htm

I believe that this board is based on a VIA Chipset. Have you loaded the latest VIA AGP drivers ?

VIA 4-in-1 or AGP-only (v. 4.24 or v. 4.03):

http://www.via.com.tw/drivers/index.htm

Also another thread deals with video problems related to nVidia chipsets under Win2K. robo has posted a "certified" driver from Dell for nVidia chipsets on his website that seems to correct the problem, but it isn't based on the latest Reference drivers. I don't know if this driver will help you will your video lockup problem though:

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum8/HTML/000502.html

[This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 08-28-2000).]

[Arrow]

I'm having a very similar problem. Sometimes CM will run for up to half an hour and then it will lock up. Other times it will run for only five minutes before locking up. And a few times it plays with no problems. When it does lock up, the audio is still playing, and Ctrl-Alt-Del only results in green vertical lines across the top of the screen and causing the sound to loop.

I'm also running a fairly new system,

HP 9695c:

Windows 98 SE

Athlon 850

256 MB Ram at 100MHz

TNT2 Pro, 16 MB (and I have a feeling that this could be part of the problem)

Creative Soundblaster Live X-Gamer

Creative Modemblaster

I'm running the latest version of CM, have the latest drivers for the SB Live and the MB, latest VIA chipset drivers, latest bios and the latest Nvidia drivers (6.18, also tried 5.33 drivers with the same problem). I've also had lockups and GPFs in Unreal Engine games similar to CM's lock ups. Anyone have an suggestions on how to fix this problem (oh, and I am using Enditall).

Thanks

[Schrullenhaft]

Arrow - do you know what IRQs are being used in your system ? Specifically the ones for your video card and audio card ? If they're sharing an IRQ, then you chances for a possible problem go up.

Your lockups seem to vary quite a bit. Is there any particular scenario or action that you're performing in CM that may be consistant in all of your problems ? Do you get lock ups issuing orders, playing back turns, scrolling around the screen, etc. ?

Are you overclocking anything on your system, especially the video card or CPU ?

From here the basic solution is removing drivers, removing devices under Safe Mode and editing the registry (and removing .inf files) then installing default SVGA drivers. After this you may want to install DirectX 7.0a again, install the latest Detonator drivers for your TNT2 and then reinstalling your sound drivers. If you want more details I can give them to you.

You may also want to try to reduce your AGP Aperture/Graphics Apeture in your CMOS/BIOS settings. You'll have to look around in your CMOS/BIOS setup to find the setting (if it even exists in your BIOS). Basically if you can't get below 16Mb with this setting, then it probably won't be worth changing (the default is usually 64Mb).

[Arrow]

IRQ stands for Interrupt Request, correct? If so, then I think this might be my problem! Both are set to 11. Whats the easiest way to change this? (let me guest, change PCI slots for the SB Live, right?). Windows also claims that both cards are conflict free. Yeah, right.

Also, my BIOS won't let my play with the aperture size. As for reinstalling, I've done all of that twice. And everything is running at its default clock speed.

[This message has been edited by Arrow (edited 08-29-2000).]

[Schrullenhaft]

Arrow - yes IRQ stands for "Interrupt Request". Since your sound card and video card are sharing an IRQ that may cause a problem. IRQs can be shared (it's not considered a "conflict"), but with the frequency that some of these devices get called upon a shared IRQ could pose problems. If you're lucky, then assigning different IRQs for your devices might solve your problem.

You're correct in that you would probably have to move your SB Live sound card to another PCI slot. If you're really lucky your CMOS/BIOS will have settings to assign a particular IRQ to each PCI slot, but few motherboards have this as an option (if you're HP is an ASUS OEM, you may just have this capability). You will also have to check to see if your BIOS is allowing Windows ("Plug & Play OS") to assign the IRQs. If it is (and hopefully you can disable it) then even if you did move the SB Live to another PCI slot it may still use the same IRQ in Windows. To prevent this (and hopefully get a free IRQ for your sound card) you need to search your CMOS/BIOS settings for an option to disable the Plug and Play OS. This setting will probably be somewhere near where you can adjust IRQs, DMA, etc.

Before you do this you need to find out if you even have a free IRQ. Apparently you know where to find the IRQ listing in the Device Manager.

As for reinstalling drivers, sometimes you need to completely remove the previous iteration you had installed, especially if it was a different piece of hardware. Killing Registry settings associated with these drivers can help too, but that can be a bit complex depending on the device.

[Purple4Ever]

Hi,

I am also having the same lockup problems - requiring a hard boot (power switch) exit.

My system specs:

PIII 600mHz

Windows 98 SE

256mb RAM

TNT2 32mb video bd

SoundBlaster Pro (yep - the old 8 bit bd - never had a reason to upgrade!)

I've upgraded the video drivers, done all of the critical (and other) updates from the MS site, upgraded to DirectX 7.0a (sumthin like that), CM 1.05,

AS with the others, sometimes it "hangs" (with the sound still playing) after 5 minutes, sometimes 20-30 minutes, sometimes longer. But it pretty much crashes (at some point) every time I play CM.

The problem got worse after I 'upgraded' (more like downgraded) my video bd with the new Detonator 3 drivers. Before that it crashed infrequently (maybe every 3rd or 4th time I fired up CM).

It's probably something to do with the video drivers.....

Don't have this problem with any other games....

Thx

[Schrullenhaft]

Purple4Ever - a SoundBlaster Pro eh ? That is quite an old card. Since it is an ISA card it shouldn't be interfering IRQ-wise with your video card, but there is a possibility that it may be having problems with CM. I'd suggest going to your DirectX control applet (C:\PROGRAM FILES\DIRECTX\SETUP\DXDIAG.EXE) and go to the Sound tab. Move the "Hardware Sound Acceleration Level" slider to the left (and this may require a reboot) and see if CM runs without locking up.

More than likely you're correct about the problem being the video driver. The Detonator 3's are a bit faster than the previous generation of drivers. One major difference with the new Detonators is that they can cache verticies (or something like that). I don't know if this is causing a problem in CM for some users or not. If you have a setting for increasing the "memory" assigned to the card you may want to increase that to see if it helps (it usually should be available from Control Panel > Display control panel > Settings > Advanced button and then one of the nVidia-DirectX tabs. I'm not sure if this setting is available by default from the reference drivers (some manufacturers show it). Otherwise you may want to play around with your AGP Aperture setting in the CMOS/BIOS setup I mentioned a couple of posts above.

[Arrow]

Well I managed to get the IRQ on the sound card to change. I had to change it to two different slots, and I had to disable COM1 and COM2 (which I don't use). My system is more stable now, but it still crashes.

With CM itself, I notice the lock problem is more likely to happen if I reload a save game two or three times (some days I take the loses the AI inflicts on me, other days I restore from an earlier save).

With my computer in general, I think another part of my problem is that my TNT2 has only 16MB of memory, that the video card likes to invade my PCI memory (my BIOs won't let me turn this off. In fact, my BIOs won't let me do much of anything). Yet anothere part of the problem is that windows likes to eat 100 to 130 MBs of RAM on start up! Thats with only Explorer and Systray running.

Also, this problem occurs on both Nvidia's Det2s (5.33) and Det3s (6.18).

Any other advice you have would much appericated, Schrullenhaft, thanks for taking the time to reply to this post.

[Schrullenhaft]

Arrow - this probably won't help much...

I've read around that a good number of users are having problems with TNTs and the Detonator 3 (6.18) drivers. From stability problems to loss of performance. However you still seem to have this problem with 5.33.

I'd suggest removing your current Reference driver (I'm not sure if there is an entry in the Add/Remove Software control panel). Delete the Display driver from the Device Manager if no uninstall option is listed. Before rebooting go to C:\WINDOWS\INF\OTHER and remove any .infs that are related to your video card (otherwise Windows will just reinstall the current Reference driver).

Now launch the Registry Editor - RegEdit (C:\WINDOWS\REGEDIT.EXE); open up the HKEY_CURRENT_USER key, go to the SOFTWARE subkey and look for anything related to "nVidia". Highlight it (in the left-hand pane) and delete the whole subkey (the "nVidia" subkey that is). Now go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and to the SOFTWARE subkey and again look for any subkeys listed as "nVidia" and delete it. Now go to the SYSTEM subkey > CURRENTCONTROLSET > SERVICES > CLASS > DISPLAY subkey in here look for any display devices listed and delete them (from the left-hand pane).

When you reboot, make sure you have your Win98 CD. The system should detect a display adapter - install the "SVGA" driver and Windows will reboot. At this point you can install DirectX 7.0a again (which might be a good idea) and then install either the 5.33 driver or the 5.32 driver you can get from here:

nVidia Reference 5.32 (go to TNT/TNT2 section):

http://www.reactorcritical.com/download.shtml

Hopefully this should get you stable again. If it doesn't then there are either more software or hardware problems with your computer.

You can adjust the "PCI Texture Memory Size" to whatever may work (possibly 15Mb or so). You'll want to enable "Fog Table Emulation".

130Mb of memory sounds like quite a bit. Where are you getting this info from - the Performance tab (with a little math) on the System control panel or from a performance monitoring applet ? I believe that when Windows is installed VMM is set for some sort of default memory setting, but I'd think that with this much memory being grabbed under Win98 something is wrong (I don't know if the "texture memory" is affecting your reading).

[Arrow]

Ok, I went through all the motions with reinstalling the 5.33 drivers. That improved things. However, if I go to anything less than 31 MB PCI texture memory my system will crash when 3D games are running. I figured this out by playing Unreal and Freespace2 (Unreal crashed in 15 minutes, FS2 crashed in 30 seconds). I haven't tested this out in CM yet, but I'm definitly going to (btw, if I didn't mention it, the lockups happen most during replays, or if I let the game sit for a few minutes during turn planning). Just to be safe, I set the PCI texture memory to 48 MB, for a total of 64. Fog emulation table is enabled.

As for were I got the memory usage, that was displayed in TNT2 properties tab in the display control panel. According to the System control panel, I have 90% resources free (which should translate into 230 MB free ram, if I understand the way Windows works correctly).

Also, since I'm believing more and more that my TNT2 card is my main problem, I want to replace it. In your opinion, should I go with a Geforce 2 GTS 64MB or an ATI Radeon?

(And why can't these PCs work like Macs? Never had this problem with a Mac)

[YouRei]

Have you tried lowering your Nvidia video card to 1x agp? How about turning sidebanding off?

This worked for me.

YouRei

[Purple4Ever]

Mr. Schrullenhaft:

Good news - after adjusting the H/W acceleration in the DirectX Sound Control Panel, I was able to play the game for (at least) a full hour w/out a crash! Happy Day!

Thanks for the tech advice.

If I have another crash, I'll tinker with the BIOS or Video settings...

Wish me luck!

Thanks again!

Edited to clarify that my computer did not crash after making the adjustments - it was getting late and after playing for at least an hour (and finishing a battle), I gave up for the night.

[This message has been edited by Purple4Ever (edited 08-31-2000).]

[Schrullenhaft]

Arrow - YouRei has some good suggestions. I can't recall where in the tabs these two settings are at for the Reference drivers, but you may want to disable/set these settings. If you can't find these settings in the nVidia drivers (they may have to be enabled by registry editing), then download the AGP Wizard:

AGP Wizard (about the middle of the page):

http://www.creativehelp.com/files/download.asp?OS=Win98∏=db_ultra

Between a GeForce 2 GTS and a Radeon, I would suggest the Geforce. The Radeon has a nice feature here and there and occasionally better performance in one benchmark or so, but the biggest issue is one of driver stability and nVidia (despite problems some people have had) creates far more stable drivers than ATI.

[Arrow]

I couldn't find anything to turn down my AGP or to turn off the sidebanding. I look through the registry, and couldn't find anything there either (although I did find a reference to my old sound card and deleted it. No effect).

Could this possibly have something to do with my SB Live? I wouldn't think it would as the crashes happen only when a lot of units are in the game or when there is a lot displayed, and since I have 256 MB Ram and a 1024MB swap file, this leads me to believe its my graphics card...

Also, I did find out that my mother is a K7M, so I might try to find a different BIOs for it (what I have now won't let me do too much).

That AGP wizard wouldn't work, kept complaining that I don't have a Creative Video card, which is true. My TNT2 is some noname card.

Thanks for the graphics card advice. I didn't know that about the drivers.

[This message has been edited by Arrow (edited 08-31-2000).]

[Schrullenhaft]

Arrow - I was afraid the Creative AGP Wizard may not work. Damn ! The registry enteries sometimes actually require that you create a subkey, so you have to have the exact info to do it. Try this utility, it may have the features you're looking for to disable on your video card:

PowerStrip 2.74 (in the Common section):

http://www.reactorcritical.com/download.shtml

I wouldn't assume that your SB Live is causing problems with it being on a different IRQ now. I run an SB Live and TNT2 Ulta at home and I haven't had any lock up problems other than when I overclocked my video card memory too far.

You probably already have the latest BIOS and there doesn't seem to be anything listed in the patches that would be applicable to your problem:

ASUS K7M BIOS (v. 1009, 4-20-00):

http://www.asus.com/Products/Motherboard/bios_slota.html

VIA IDE drivers (580.2149):

http://www.via.com.tw/drivers/index.htm

While your "southbridge" chipset is VIA based, your northbridge is an AMD 751 chipset (which controls your AGP slot). The drivers on the AMD site are a bit newer, but there doesn't seem to be anything that's significantly different in terms of your problem with the v. 4.45 that is posted on ASUS's website:

AMD's AGP miniport driver v. 4.71:

http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/

[Arrow]

I installed the AGP miniport and the Powerstrip program. I had already installed the VIA drivers, including the IDE and the 4.03 AGP driver.

Turns out sidebanding was off on my card, so I turned it on (haven't tested it yet). I'm currently running at AGP 2x. Is there much difference between the 1x, 2x and 4x settings, speed and stablity wise?

I haven't downloaded the BIOs yet, as ASUS's description of the K7M differs slighty from mine. They mention the K7M having an ISA slot and a few other things mine doesn't have. Is it possible that HP modified the board? Because it definity says K7M on it. I'm not going to install the BIOs until I'm sure its reasonably safe.

[Schrullenhaft]

Arrow - I forgot that your ASUS board is an OEM for HP (details like this always seem to slip my mind - so it is good that you checked for yourself before applying the BIOS update). You may want to stick with the HP BIOS because ASUS does make modifications to some of its boards for OEMs and the lack of a ISA slot may be significant (or just HP being cheap).

If you have that VIA AGP driver installed, uninstall it. The AGP is controlled by the AMD chip, but since you have the AMD AGP miniport installed this may not matter now.

Sidebanding allows for greater bandwidth to the AGP card. I forget the technical details of side-banding off-hand. I would think that the system would possibly be less stable with it on, but try it with it on and see if it makes a difference (there may be a limitation, depending on the revision of your AMD chipset, on sidebanding). Your video card should be able to use AGP 2X and the AMD chipset supports this too, but you may want to try AGP 1X and see if it helps.

[This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 08-31-2000).]

[Arrow]

Looks like AGP 1x makes my system more unstable, as some D3D programs crash much quicker now. Back to 2x. For some reason Powerstrip has disabled sidebanding and won't turn it back on. Must be a first time use glitch.

I haven't tried uninstalling the VIA AGP driver yet, but thats a simple matter since I have the set up program. I notice another interesting thing I my Inf folder. I have something called ALiAGP.inf. What it does, I have no idea. I'm going to see what happens when I remove it.

Also, is it possible for CM and my other programs to be 'choking' when they try to get data from the swapfile? (BTW, Powerstrip confirmed that Windows is taking up about 100 MBs of Ram on start up. What a bloated OS. I wish I could stop that.)

And is Windows ME any better than 98 SE?

(maybe I should make my signature read "Crash Magnet")

[Arrow]

Well, removing the VIA and ALi AGP drivers hasn't changed my system much. I ran a quick test, and it still crashes.

Also, would a lack of memory cause a general protection faults. When my games don't lockup completely, they usually crash with some sort of GPF error.

[Schrullenhaft]

Arrow - any details on the GPFs that you're getting ? Specifically do there seem to be any particular files mentioned consistently ?

Have you had this install of Windows on different motherboards (in other words have you upgraded the motherboard with this same hard drive installed) ? That would possibly account for the the ALI inf file. It shouldn't make a difference if you don't have any VXDs loaded up for it.

With the number of problems you are at, I'd suggest a clean installation of Windows. If you have enough hard disk space (preferably 400+ MB for 98) you can do this without killing your current copy (since you would have to reinstall all of your Windows programs over again with a true clean install). Exit Windows to the DOS prompt. Rename your C:\WINDOWS directory with the move command to something like WINOLD (ex. C:\>MOVE C:\WINDOWS C:\WINOLD). You will need to edit your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to load up your CDROM driver and MSCDEX. When you reboot you should hopefully have access to your CDROM. Run Scandisk to check for errors (this will require that HIMEM.SYS be loaded). Reinstall Windows98 and make sure that you specify a different directory than what Windows finds to install in. It will find the WINOLD directory and specify that to install into. Instead make sure it is C:\WINDOWS. After you've installed Windows98 install your AGP, IDE and sound drivers and then install DirectX 7.0a and finally the Detonator 5.33 driver and of course CM. You may also want to install PowerStrip for the extra control features it offers.

See if this makes a difference or not. If not, the to delete this copy of Windows exit to the DOS prompt again and type C:\>DELTREE C:\WINDOWS and rename your old Windows directory (ex. C:\>MOVE C:\WINOLD C:\WINDOWS).

My experience with WindowsME makes me hesitant to suggest upgrading to it (since it may corrupt your copy of Windows). If you decide to get a copy you may have to do a new installation of it. I'm not truly impressed with ME at this point. If anything it will eat up more disk space and more memory and possibly be slower at something or another (the Wintel version of "improvement"). It does have some newer drivers in it and other minor improvements, but you can get these from the manufacturers. I would suggest saving the money and sticking with Windows98 SE for now.

[This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 09-01-2000).]

[Arrow]

Most of thee GPFs usually mention D3D errors (especially in anything that uses the Unreal Engine).

I also went out and bought a Geforce 2 GTS 64 MB card today (the Hercules one). I'm also using the 6.18 drivers again, turned off FSAA and I upgraded the cards bios. CM looks great and the camera responses quicker. No lock ups so far, but I've only played a few turns of Vickers Bocage-Tiger! FS2 seems to like the new card, but Unreal is giving me a fit still.

This is 3 month old computer, and the processor, disk drives and motherboard have not been upgraded (Everything else has been). Also, I've reinstalled windows three times now. However, each time has been with the HP recovery disk, which dumps drivers for things that I remove right back into the OS. I've been doing some thinking along this line, and was wondering if moving my current Inf folder out of windows and letting windows detect the hard I actually have on my system and install the proper drivers would do the trick? So I give it a shot?

[Schrullenhaft]

Arrow - Dang... I'd like to get that card myself. Trying to justify the purchase.... Have you checked GT software's (?) tech support for any answers/problems with the 6.18 drivers and Unreal ?

If you remove the complete C:\WINDOWS\INF directory I believe Windows is going to have a hard time detecting anything. Most of the time (but not always, unfortunately) manufacturers will put their .infs in the C:\WINDOWS\INF\OTHER directory. So scanning through this may get most of the unwanted .infs. Otherwise it is a search through the INF directory for the non-standard .infs (opening with NotePad or WordPad to check out the contents).

Does your recovery CD offer the option of just installing Windows98 alone (through a standard install) or do you have to "recover" it from the CD (which just copies the whole program intact to the directory on the hard drive without the standard install process) ? If you have the option of running a standard install I'd do that. Those recovery CD's are nice to have, but they can be a complete bane to getting things working the way they should sometimes.

[Arrow]

I tried the my Inf idea, and it didn't do anything (windows just booted up normally). Everything in the Inf/Other folder is only stuff thats on my system, and I have no idea what most of the stuff in the Inf folder itself is. The recovery CD has no option to install just plain windows.

Also, powerstrip says the 62 MBs of Ram alone are going to DirectX.

I've also noticed that some programs aren't getting higher frame rates with the new card.

GT's tech support is the standard 'yadda yadda' blame it on the graphics card company site. Also, D3D was an after though for the Unreal engine, so I might try a Glide Wrapper.

So far, no new crashes with CM, as Wittmann's Tiger rampages through British lines.

Update:

CM finally crashed after an hour and half of large battles, reloading files and burning tanks. I think this is acceptable. Could also mean that I have a RAM leak some where.

Also, with regards to Unreal reporting frame rates similar to my old TNT2 card with the GTS, I found out that Unreal simply can't report numbers that high. It just said I was getting 6 FPS when I know that I probably getting over a hundred (I've seen 6 FPS before on my Mac, so I know what that looks like, and this wasn't it!)

[This message has been edited by Arrow (edited 09-01-2000).]