CMBO/CMBB freezing at certain times

[TufenHuden]

Dear Sir,

When I play either CMBO/CMBB,it varies,either up to an HR,40-mins,30-secs,it simply freezes on me,I've tried every nvidia driver-30.82 on up,some drivers will do this too I'll load the game,screen will go black but still

hear the CMBB music,then I'll do the alt-tab back and forth,know if I go either 30.82 or 44.03 that doesn't happen unless if I try anti-alasing,from 2x-4x,it's on or off with the black screen thing,I've direct-X9-p-111-1.2 gig,G-Force-4-4400-128mb-gainward card,asus-tua-266-mobo-ddr-1-gig of ddr-ram,I've 2-drives-1-dvd-1-burner,2-blower fans,I run Win-98-SE,I just put in a 400-watt power supply in,thinking maybe it was a power problem but that didn't solved that either,my case is well ventilated,I told you guys about this problem before,you guys said heating problem,my asus utility that tells me about my cpu says otherwise,that it isn't overheating,my system recourse's are at 95%,I've have been at this problem for about 5-months now,I love your game but it's soooo dam buggy,you also had some guy that MaddMatt knows who has a cpu lab,I

ask for his email,never got a reply on that,I'm a faithful and loyal customer,all I want is for this game to work almost perfect,and also play my other games as well,I've tried all your trouble shooting 6x,this is most frustrating,can't really play or enjoy tcp/ip because of the dang thing will freeze,no other game acts like this except yours,with all do respect,just want a solution or someone to held me,but I'm limited in my abilities,

you guys made the game,I've tried everything I know,not to knock CMBO/CMBB,but the game isn't Quake-111,the graphics are simple,I got good stuff so please give me some help.I got Ali driver

1.91,nvidia drivers-30.82/been going back and forth with 44.03's-vidcard is a Gainward-GF-4-4400

128mb-goldensample/ultra/700dt/ti-4400series,need some help :confused: ......

Cheers

John

[bidermann]

i feel sorry for you i have problems even loading the damn game... i have emailed CDV,they are as much use as a kick in the pants.i hope you sort your problem out i dout if i will sort mine:-(

[TufenHuden]

Well I tried omega nvidia-44.03 drivers last night

and still does same thing,about CDV I heard it's going bankrupt,you might want to give BTS a email

instead,since they made the game,trade it for a americian version,I heard the CDV's 1.03 patch

suxs,but the 1.03v patch here is good,I can load and play the game,but if you can't load it that sux to,Goodluck I hope that helps you out.

[TufenHuden]

Testing changed display name from John C Field to

TufenHuden

[Schrullenhaft]

I'm the guy that Madmatt told you about. He didn't hand out my email address since it didn't feel appropriate to him since I'm not a BTS/BFC employee. He was hoping that you would post to the forum so that I and others can attempt to help.

Madmatt has gone over a number of possibilities with you regarding the problem already. Admittedly I may have very little new to add that you haven't read or heard already.

One thing to remember about built-in temperature monitoring on motherboards is that they're not always correct, for a number of reasons. Calibration of the thermal sensor, age and installation issues can effect the accuracy of the thermal diode's measurements and what the BIOS and/or utilities report back for temperatures. So you're temperature readings can be anywhere from 5-10°C off of their actual values (most often lower than the actual value).

Despite the possibility that your temperature readings are inaccurate, you're problem may not be heat-related regarding the CPU. It may however be heat-related regarding your video card. The CM series deceptively appears to have simple graphics that any card can run. The reason for that is the limitation on color depth (16-bit color) and the lack of high-end features of shading and lighting (Transform & Lighting - T&L), etc. The truth is that while CM's color depth and lack of high-end effects make it look like it is a low-end game, it really isn't. CM probably pushes far more polygons and textures than an majority other 3D games on the market. The reason for this is that CM usually has far more unique 3D models on the screen and a much larger horizon than many other 3D games on the market. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that CM could overheat your video card.

Are you overclocking your video card in any way (memory or GPU) ? Sometimes this can push a video card to the edge. It may run without problem in one 3D game, but another could cause it to crash quite quickly. I can't remember what Gainward includes with their video cards, but they often have an overclocking utility.

Do you notice if there is anything in particular that is happening in the game when you lockup, i.e. - turn calculation, AI thinking, issuing orders, scrolling around the map, etc. ?

What programs do you have running in the background (Ctrl-Alt-Del) ? Have you closed up any instant-messaging clients that are running ? These programs have the habit of crashing CM at times. I suggest closing down any running programs in the background to see if this helps. You should only need 'Explorer' and 'Systray' running and almost everything else should be optional.

I wouldn't necessarily think that your problems stem from a particular version of the NVidia Detnoator drivers. While there are problems with some versions of these drivers, it is fairly rare that they'll be the culprit in a lockup (but it is possible).

Though I have no idea if it will help at all or if it is even related to your problem, you may want to update your audio drivers (if they aren't already). Your motherboard has the C-Media 8738 chipset and you can find the drivers from C-Media (click on: CMI8738 > then choose either the 'WMD' or 'VxD' driver - the WMD driver is newer). You may be running a VXD driver, which is a bit older (and the original driver architecture for Win9x). A WMD driver may require that you uninstall your audio drivers to install it properly. The WMD drivers that C-Media have posted are much newer than the VXD drivers, so you may want to try them, however they may provide problems with installation, so keep some updated VXD drivers on hand.

Which BIOS do you have on your motherboard ? The latest one from ASUS is 1.03, although there is a beta v. 1.04 available too (though it may not do anything differently).

You may want to download ALI's integrated driver v. 2.05 (select 'Integrated Driver' in the top 'search by driver' list) though it most likely has the AGP 1.9 driver that you have installed already.

I don't think that there is 'something buggy' about CM that is causing your problems. Games can stress your computer differently and that is probably the case here, where other games will run, but CM has problems.

[TufenHuden]

I'm at 95% system resourse's,I've closed out everthing except systra/explorer,I've uninstalled/

reinstalled from 30.82 drivers on up to 44.03,I've

tried nvidia's,omega's,gainwards drivers,you tell me my GF-4-4400-Gainward vid-card-128-mb doesn't

have what it takes to run,CMBO/CMBB,I don't have the overclock utility on,my asus has the ALI-agp

1.91 drivers,I've have direct-X9,my p-111-1.2 gig

tualitan chip doesn't run hot like p-4's do,know audio drivers I haven't messed with,but still I can't why that would affect it cosidering that I here everything or sounds on both games,before I

upgraded-I had a p-111-600mhz-slot-1 bx-2 dell

mobo/at only 2x-agp-voodoo-5500-agp-64-mb,and I ran both CMBO/CMBB good-I could play tcp/ip,pbem

and I frooze 1-3000,still had the voodoo issues

but nothing like this,nvidia,BTS,CMBO/CMBO must be really buggy because it seems nothing likes to run with it,I've got good hardware,so I'll try the other things you have stated,still fustrated,

all I want to do is wargame,I wish all PC-game makers make there stuff right for the get go,patch

this,patch that,and yeah your right I don't how to make games I don't know what it's like,but I would try to make it perfect with all do respect.

[Schrullenhaft]

I'm not sure what to say. Many users here have GeForce cards and other than some driver issues (black screens, FSAA, etc.), many of them can run CMBO/CMBB without lockup.

I'm not saying that your GeForce 4 4400 doesn't have the capability of playing CM. It's just that CM is much more graphically intensive than most players give it credit for. The color depth and lack of T&L has most players assuming that a 2Mb video card could run this game. When it comes to overclocking, some games run better than others. In CM's case, overclocking can result in lockups or screen corruption that may not be seen in other games (when the video card is overclocked to a certain speed).

Although it isn't the same experience, try playing CM with the sound turned off (Shift+S until 'Sound=OFF'). CM generates a lot of sound data, which might be flooding your PCI bus. The ALI Aladdin Pro 5T chipset doesn't have a separate interconnect bridge-bus and hence all data gets sent over the PCI bus. With the audio data and other things moving over the bus, it is possible that you're getting into a lockup situation (though this is pure conjecture). Do you know which version of the CMI 8738 drivers you have installed (VxD or WMD) ?

I have no idea if sound is the underlying cause or not with your system. Even turning off sound within CM may not completely eliminate the possibility that sound might be the cause of the problem.

Are you using the default or automatic memory settings for the motherboard (in the CMOS/BIOS setup) or have you 'tweaked' them to higher settings ? Do you have 'AGP Fast Writes' enabled (ADVANCED > CHIP CONFIGURATION) ? Under the same section what is 'AGP Capability' set to, 4X ? Possibly reducing this setting (1X or 2X), which will affect performance for some apps, may make a difference in the frequency of lockups under CM.

We all empathize with your problems, but the lack of consistency in their occurance (1 hour to several seconds of running CM) make it very hard to troubleshoot and offer effective suggestions to the problem.

Let us know if there is any progress with either the sound or CMOS/BIOS settings.

[TufenHuden]

Well I swapped out the Gainward-4400-put back the

asus-v8420-4200-128-mb-I had the ali-agp-drivers

1.91 in then during intstallation it said to put in ali-agp-drivers-1.69 in I did that,then played cmbb for about a hr-before that it started freezing at 1-min-,I checked the dxdiag file and

the display tab-the agp texture accelation was grayed meaning I couldn't enable or disable it so I reinstalled agp-ali-1.91 drivers then the

agp-texture acellation was enable and not grayed

the played cmbb agian,it froze in 1-min-I'm trying

to fix this still and talking to asus tech support again and getting same answeres memory,stuff,I've swapted this for that go figue..

[TufenHuden]

Having problems unzippping those patches,I got winzip,also what does this mean( CMI 8738 drivers you have installed (VxD or WMD) ?audio drivers and if so where do I dig in windows-98-SE to find out,Thank you for the suggestions so far,I'm still

convinced it's the AGP-1.91-drivers,ASUS tech support told me to MEM-TEST-86-ram tester program,

it took 2 days to finish and he said a HR or two,

but ram is good,I got infineon -2-pc-2100-512mb

sticks,1-GIG-ECC-nonregistered,low parity,they always say the memory,if it was then my hole cpu wouldn't boot,go figue :confused: I wish there was

a fourm on MOBO problems,well Thank You.

[Schrullenhaft]

I suggest changing your CMOS settings for the AGP Multiplier that I mentioned above. Possibly lowering your AGP to a 2X might help things. You may also want to download the AGP Utility v. 1.40 (underneath the banner is the link - you can go to the ALI website and find it there too). I'm not sure of the 'tweaking' capabilities of this utility, but it may also allow you to change some settings without getting into the CMOS/BIOS setup.

The ALI chipsets haven't really been that good in awhile. Manufacturers don't often use their chipsets for motherboard designs. The ALI designs were falling out of favor because they weren't competitive in the performance realm. I haven't followed up to find out if there were greater than normal issues of compatibility, etc. I've heard of complaints from users attempting to run the 3D Mark Benchmark (2001) with GeForces in an ALI Aladdin chipset. Some of the benchmark scenes wouldn't run.

Interestingly enough, Win2K & XP drivers for the NVidia cards will disable AGP support for the ALI M1647 (which isn't your chip, but it is closely related). There have also been problems in the past with TNT-based video cards and the ALI chipsets.

For CM's purposes (though you may play other games that may perfer other drivers) the 30.82/30.87 drivers are the best ones to use with your video card (as long as it isn't an AGP 8X model, which needs newer drivers).

To discern if you're using the WDM or VxD drivers go to Control Panels > System control panel > Device Manager tab > click on the Sound and/or Multimedia section > click on the listing for the CMI 8738 Sound System. You may have several devices listed here, including a Sound Blaster, etc. There should be one that specifically mentions the 8738 in some manner. Double-click on this device listing and then click on the Driver tab > Driver Details button. This should show a cascading list of drivers associated with this device. You may notice one that has ".vxd" as its extension. This will generally be the older (and more common) VxD driver. The WDM drivers will typically have an extension of ".sys", though there may be some files associated with the VxD driver that have the .sys extension too. WDM drivers may also be indicated in the Device name as it is listed in the Device Manager.

In CMedia's case the WDM drivers are newer than the VxD ones. Hence there's a possibility that these newer drivers may have less problems or potentially had more bug-fixes applied to them. However some WDM drivers don't always "take" and install properly with Windows 98SE or WinME. The troubleshooting that you've performed seems to suggest that the problem lies with your AGP settings and the ALI AGP drivers.

[TufenHuden]

My soundcard is a sound blaster live-5.1 dodbly,

I thought about ditching that and going phillips,

sound card instead,3D-Benchmark-2001,I was able to run with the 3DFX-Voodoo-5500-agp-64mb,but this

GF-4-4400-it does run at all,so nvidia just sux,

there drivers blow chunks/maybe not with others,

but when a voodoo-5500 runs decent enough with

ali,then nvidia should too,I wish I could send you my DXAIG file but,I don't have your email address,but I respect your privacy,I wish I could send a go between,to madmatt to you,I'll try the stuff you suggest,the 30.82 drivers are there best

but nvidia should work hard on all there drivers

to be MS certified,well Thank you for looking-Sir.

.

[TufenHuden]

WDM emu10k1-but having problem's removing it,I've downloaded those drivers,trying to give it a whirl

that agp-utility doesn't work well it does that

when I try to boot cmbb,I hear the music but no screen,have to press tab/alt to get into the game to see the options,but did the same thing about 1-min it froze :eek: :eek: :mad: ....not at you

just in general......

[ September 09, 2003, 12:10 PM: Message edited by: TufenHuden ]

[Schrullenhaft]

The C-Media 8738 audio chip is optional on the ASUS TUA266 motherboards. A majority of these boards don't have it, but for some reason I thought you did.

Do not download and install the C-Media drivers I pointed you to. They will do nothing for you since this isn't the audio that you're using. Instead, download these Sound Blaster Live MP3+ drivers, dated 4-02-2002 (though this link may not direct you to the actual download page correctly - any of the Live series drivers should work). You may already have these drivers, which would make uninstalling your current set unnecessary.

I'm not sure how you previously uninstalled your video drivers, but you may want to use these utilities you can download from Guru 3D (Videocard drivers > NVIDIA detonator drivers) such as Detonator R.I.P., nVidia Nasty File Remover, etc. These will remove all of the files from your system that are related to your nVidia drivers. You'll generally want to use the Add/Remove Programs control panel first before using any of these.

With 30.82/30.87 or earlier (but not all earlier versions) FSAA should work and not result in the Black-Out problem. If you're using drivers newer than these, then FSAA can cause the screen to come up completely black and you can't refresh the screen until you minimize (Alt-Tab) and re-maximize CM. You can check your FSAA setting by going to Control Panel > Display control panel > Settings tab > Advanced... button > the tab that is named with whatever GeForce you have installed > Additional Properties... button > 3D Antialiasing settings tab. If it is set to "Allow applications to control the antialiasing mode", then FSAA is off for CM (and a majority of other games/programs). You can also set it to "Manually select the antialiasing mode" and then select the OFF selection. With newer 4x.xx series drivers the control panel is setup a bit differently, where it appears as a 'menu tree' to the left of the control panel applet.

The ALI AGP utility is a bit dated and I couldn't remember what its functionality was. Have you been able to try out reducing the AGP Multiplier yet ? The utility might be capable of doing this (though it may call it Turbo and non-Turbo mode or something like that).

There are some other utilities you can use and experiment with to see if they help your situation at all or not. From the above link for Guru 3D you can go to Videocard utilities > Overclocking and Tweaking and get RivaTuner 2.0 (it's listed with some other ATI related files) or GeForce Tweak Utility or nVHardPage (which is primarily geared towards overclocking). You can also download PowerStrip 3.16 from here, which can be a very useful utility. It may be able to modify some of your AGP settings that you would normally do from the CMOS/BIOS setup or an AGP utility. You can also get a newer shareware version from the manufacturer: PowerStrip 3.45 (the purchased version enables some additional features).

[ September 09, 2003, 01:37 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[TufenHuden]

I also tried somthing different,I changed a setting on the bois set-up awhile back I changed

video memory cache mode-I had on USWC or

(uncacheable,speculative write combining)is a new

technology for video memory of processor.It suppose to greatly improve the display speed by caching the display data,I don't know if my

GF-4-4400 supports it or not but I changed it back to UC(uncacheable)and it lasted about an hr

before freezing,go figue,I went to guru3d to check it out,I'll try that as well ....I had

powerstrip before,how does that help out if you can explain how it works please Thank You...

[ September 09, 2003, 02:28 PM: Message edited by: TufenHuden ]

[TufenHuden]

Also these adjustments where on the asus-v8420-

4200 card,I'll switch over to the Gainward-G-F-4

4400 ans see if it does the same,the 4400 is a

the faster card ......

[TufenHuden]

also another strange thing,I don't know if it has to do with the power saving,but while I was testing,or leaving a movie on for about 40-mins I started moving around the map,then it frooze then

I heard the power kick back on full when I moved the mouse again,then it unfrooze,could the power saving mod have something to do with it :confused: :eek:

[ September 10, 2003, 02:31 AM: Message edited by: TufenHuden ]

[Schrullenhaft]

I'm not sure what kind of power saving you have that would freeze up the display while you were moving around a mouse. Was a CM turn playback movie up on the screen when power saving kicked in or was this some other sort of movie (MPEG or DVD) ? I can imagine a 'pause'(/freeze) in the display that might be lengthy due to something that the computer may be doing in the background. I'm not sure what you experienced when you heard the 'clicks', but it may have been a power saving state (hard drives turned off ?).

Generally a GeForce card (and many others) should support USWC (it's been available almost as long as AGP has been a feature on motherboards). Disabling this feature and using UC instead might make the system more stable. I'm not sure what effect it has on display speed since the video drivers may handle all of these features. The AGP Multiplier seems to be something that effects a number of video cards or their stability (actually the motherboard's stability in handling certain video cards).

[TufenHuden]

This time I let it run,and to a surprise it lasted

for and 1-hr-1/2,with a movie going on with blds

on fire/smoke/2800 piont,with lots of blds or factories/then it did that power thing where it's like it's on power save and then the power kicks in,it frooze for a couple the when I move the mouse it unfrooze,then I alt-p and stoped the game,this was on the asus-v8240-4200-128-mb-card,

but it still does the thing where you boot the game,get the black screen but here the game music,

have to tab-alt to get it to options,still haven't installeb the audio stuff,I also had it on

2X anti-aliasing-texture sharping-performance...

:eek: :eek: so all I have to do is to try

the 4400 and see it works on there as well and

the black screen thing/I'll be a happy camper for

now. :eek:

[ September 11, 2003, 12:17 AM: Message edited by: TufenHuden ]

[TufenHuden]

I put in the 4400 in and tested it for an hr and

did not frooze,had it on 2x-4x,and some visual

goodies on and still stayed on so however got a

ASUS-TUA-266-mobo-make sure it's on UC mode on your AGP port or vidoe cache mode to UC instead of

USWC when in the bios,I didn't download or installed all those other audio drivers,so for know this has done the trick,by luck I found it out,

also this was still tested on 44.03 drivers.

:eek: :eek: Cheers

TufenHuden

[TufenHuden]

Also just finished a 2000 piont tcp/ip game,and

it went well excepted it frooze about 4x due to

that the person is from Austrilia and he had dailup and I had broadband,that's prob why it frooze,but it didn't freeze in 30 secs like it did in the past.