CMBB locks up on my ThinkPad A20m

[Sgian Dubh]

CMBB starts fine. After a few minutes it locks up. Have to reboot machine to recover.

IBM Thinkpad A20M

PIII 500

512 Megs of RAM

All drivers & BIOS up to spec according the IBM Thinkpad site.

ATI Rage Mobility-M AGP - latests drivers

Crystal Sound Fusion - latest drivers

Win 2000 Professional with Service Pack 3

DirectX 8.1x installed.

Help please.

[Sgian Dubh]

So it appears that I can prevent the 'lock-ups' by turning the sound completely off.

Needless to say, this lessens the enjoyment of the game a wee bit.

[Schrullenhaft]

I assume that your laptop is configured with the ACPI protocol which has the habit of forcing all PCI/AGP devices to a single IRQ. This is a bit problematic for games since they can be pushing the sound and video hardware much harder simultaneously than any desktop app. Some drivers don't appreciate sharing an IRQ and when push comes to shove for CPU attention (doled out via IRQ) some things just lockup.

Unfortunately deconfiguring your laptop to use a BIOS assigned IRQ setup (disabling ACPI) may not be an option and if it is, then you will usually have to install Windows from scratch to get rid of the ACPI configurations written into the registry (or something to that effect).

Where did you get your Crystal Sound Fusion drivers from, IBM or Cirrus Logic/Crystal (I'm not sure which driver is applicable to your setup) ?

[Sgian Dubh]

Hi , and thanks for your help.

I obtained my drivers from the IBM site. I have found that it is best only to use the drivers that IBM says are okay for the ThinkPad.

I'll fiddle around with it some more to see if I can figure a way around this.

I realized after thinking about this that I had the same problem with CMBO at first.

Fortunately, the laptop is only my backup. I can't get to my main machine because we are having remodelling done to our house.

Reinstalling with a non ACPI HAL is not going to be possible as the laptop is my main work machine.

Thanks again.

[Sgian Dubh]

I was thinking about your post and I am a bit puzzled about one thing:

We build imaging systems and many of the boards used need to have an interrupt all to themselves. Yet we have found that with Win 2000 Professional and the ACPI HAL that most of our IRQ problems were taken care of at the HAL level. We no longer reserve a specific IRQ for a given slot.

Many of the operations for imaging are as intense as the game would be and so it would seem that your comment would argue that the ACPI HAL would have exacerbated our problem, not nearly eliminated it.

[Schrullenhaft]

It all depends on how good the drivers are. With a game both the sound and video are being hammered at the same time. If the drivers can't take sharing the IRQ for the CPUs attention (lack of hardware buffers or whatever), then they may crash the application. There are a lot of variables. Comparing it to your imaging systems may not be an accurate comparison, unless you're concurrently accessing another device that is sharing the same IRQ as the imaging hardware.

[Sgian Dubh]

OKay.

Thanks.

I've been searching around for ways to shift one of the IRQs. So far I have found little, but I'll keep looking. I can't be the only person who has wanted to do this on a A20m.

[thewood]

I have an A20m also. I run Win98 on it and the CMBB demo worked fine. I haven't been able to successfully install the full version yet. If I manage to finally get the game installed, I'll let you know what happens. I think that in general though, companies like BTS have given up on us laptop users.

Originally posted by Sgian Dubh:

OKay.

Thanks.

I've been searching around for ways to shift one of the IRQs. So far I have found little, but I'll keep looking. I can't be the only person who has wanted to do this on a A20m.