Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Thanks to the sound advice contained in the V2 patch, I am now able to run WIN:SPMBT with sound on - without the game freezing after 5 or 6 moves. Hurrah!

Still get the flashes back to desktop when starting-up, but that's no big deal.

Thank you, Mr Gailey and the Team!

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

It seems now after patching to 2.0-cd I am having sound crashes again. I had these before but they were cured by converting the mp3 files to wav. I noticed that after the patch I had to replace the sound ini file again, but that did not help. I even moved all the mp3 files away to make sure the game is not playing them..

The crash is as follows, and it always occurs a few mins into the game, when I push a button, usually, or when some other sound is supposed to be played:

AppName: winspmbt.exe AppVer: 1.0.3.5 ModName: mmswitch.ax
ModVer: 0.9.9.0 Offset: 00001b30

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

It seems most of the problems relating to sound are caused by 'bad' or incompatible codecs installed, usually through a pack or a third-party player, with that codec taking over the playing of MP3 through DirectSound. This is probably also why playing WAVs instead works.

You could try unregistering this mmswitch.ax file by typing the following in Start Senu > Run:
regsvr32 /u mmswitch.ax

Also here's what a quick google on this came up with:
http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/faq/faq_entry0027.shtml
http://forums.designtechnica.com/arc...hp/t-1399.html
http://forums.divx.com/groupee/forum...51/m/622103981

I've been playing around with codecs and A/V splitter files lately so I know this can sometimes be a real pain to fix http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Hope this helps,
Stian

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Yes, it seems disabling or removing the file does stop the crashes. Too bad since I installed the software (Morgan stream switcher) for a reason. I haven't noticed it giving me problems in any other app or game.

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

My game only flashes in full screen mode but it is kind of a pulsating glitch like possibly a HZ problem? Also it doesn't pulse in the menu screens before the actual battlefield screen. I'm running XP on an older Sony Viao laptop using AC not battery. Any idea about the way to fix?

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

No haven't seen it- only full screen

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

"using AC not battery" - does that mean that you do not get a problem when running on batteries then?. If so - possibly as a wild guess, something to do with power saving features, or some other lap-top specific power widget thingy?.

Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Hi

I can't get winspmbt to run stable on my PC.

Have any one here had the same type of crash as I have?

The screen turns almost purple, and then it is divided into 4 sections all showing the game screen (still most purple).

(No I have not been drinking or eating any funny mushrooms)

Some times it just crashes ordinary with a black screen.

I guess it is a graphic issue (I have turned the sound completely off)

I run the game on a PC with Win ME with a RADEON 9550 card.

Regards

Stonefire

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I'm running Win ME but not with that card although that card should work.

Here are two things to try first

1] Make sure you have the latest driver for your card

2] Click on START then RUN then type in dxdiag and press OK and see if there are problems with your machine using Direct X

Don

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Hi Don Thank YOU :-))

Right on spot

I ran dxdiag and the screen froze in one of the tests.

It turned out that a new driver was released in September.
I got that.

And so far it seems that the game runs smoothly now.

Regards

Stonefire

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I just got the CD version, and am having a problem. When I get to the main menu screen I can try and select anything and when I click on say editor nothing happens. I've waited a couple of minutes and still nothing happens. When I do the task master it has [not responding] next to WinSPMBT. This has happened in both windowed and full screen. Occasionally this does not happen, but 9 out of 10 times it does. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

BTW I'm running Windows 98, PIII 550mHz

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I'll assume the download version game ran fine, sound and all?

[If you did not try out the download game first - then try running with all sound off, including the interface click (page 2 of game options). I'll assume you have DirectX installed, but even so - start->run and entering dxdiag as the program to run there to test your DirectX settings may help]

Then I would try deinstalling, then reinstalling the CD version.

If this still keeps happening then
1) Deinstall, and then run the windows scandisk utily to defragment the drive, it will also find any lost clusters. Reinstall. Retry.

2) Same again - but this time try a surface check on the drive for any bad disk clusters. That test can take overnight to run, and on modern drives it is rare to find bad clusters.

3)If that has not sorted the problem, I would suspect a bad CD - return to shrapnel for a replacement. [ You can skip straight to this test by trying the installlation on a different machine - a friend's say - and if it works there, your box is the problem, if it fails, then it is likely a bad CD ]


Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

The download version had the same problem, but not as frequently. I turned off mouse click and was able to load a scenerio, but it froze almost immediately. I have since turned the sound fx off, and have not had any problems. Time to break down and get a new system though http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

The game crashes so much it's practicaly unplayable...

It happens both on windowed and fullscreen mode and quite often in deployment mode, though I have seen the game irritatingly often crash mid-game.

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Read through all the posts in this thread and the "XP sound problems thread" and you should find the solution to your problem. The game is stable on 99% of the systems. You don't tell us what your OS is or your graphics card or if you are running it DirectX or GDI mode or even if you've tried any changes so we cannot help you beyond suggesting you read these threads to discover the solution. The first step would be press Start then Run then type DXDiag and see if there is a problem with Dx on your machine. Then check to see that you are using the most up to date driver for your graphics card. Those two suggestions have helped a lot of people get the game running

Don

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I had the game crash on my computer at home, but I swapped out the MP3's for WAV's and it's been rock solid ever since.

On another note, loaded the game onto my laptop and never had the game so much as flicker.

Cheers,
Wes

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Downloaded WinSPMBT. Patched to 2.5. Managed to get it to work (XP). Can play scenarios without any problems. But when I want to go to the editor or play a battle the programm will crash to desktop. Before it crashes I very briefly can see the programm trying to build up a screen that is not the one it should be as shown in the game manual. (It includes a lever to select the type of battle instead of an arrow bar)

Anybody knows the problem and how to fix it?

Greetings

Guderdian

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Never heard of that one, at all. There is no "lever" to select the battle type. (See the game manual, "scenario editor) link for the correct picture).

The only thing I can think of is that you have a corrupt download or that you have installed an old SHP file from some other SP-series game into yours?. Or that you have some disk file problems.
- try downloading the files once more
- but before that, run the scandisk utility on your hard drive to fix any lost clusters, etc and then try reinstalling from the zips you already have once it has fixed any disk errors.

What are your system specs?. What version of DirectX etc?.

Did you download using some sort of "download manager"?.
What file size (exact byte count) for the files? (I don't have the install packages on this machine, but Don does and can check these for correct size - wrong file size=a corrupted download, for sure).


Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I'll add my info to this thread...

I have 2 different hardware profiles set-up on my machine (running win xp sp2). The first is normal and it loads all the various services that run under Windows. The second profile is my "gaming" profile that turns off pretty much every unnecessary service (if you scroll down to the chart called "power user" here http://web.archive.org/web/200411280...servicecfg.htm you will see which services I turn off).

When I play SPMBT under my gaming profile, it works like a charm, the only exception being an occasional blink that very infrequently sends me back to the desktop (but game is still running fine, must just hit the button again -- equivalent of alt-tabbing out).

However, if I play under my normal hardware profile, almost every time the game at some point flashes in a highly pixalated and weird color scheme. All smoke changes from the white/gray to colored pixels that look quite kaleidoscopic. Sometimes the entire screen changes to that state, sometimes it just remains the smoke, the text and the borders.

As noted above, I am using Win XP (Home) SP2. My vidcard is a Radeon X800 (AGP). My drivers and Direct X are all up to date and operate fine.

It appears quite strongly to me that the problem is one of these services that is running. While its not a problem for me (I simply reboot into my gaming profile), I would be willing to provide further information if you think it would help you troubleshoot the issue.

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

We already state in the manual to turn off unecessary programs and background tasks.

It may be useful though to figure out which common background tasks cause problems, if any.

A standard one that causes the game to go slow and jittery for me at least is Norton's sheduled weekly anti-virus scan. (the clue whn playing full screen is the hard disk starts chittering away like crazy http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif!. This anti-virus scan does NOT seem to realise that the end user is currently playing a full screen DirectX game (I have had it go off when playing e.g. the Sims2).

the other suspects I have is thewindows disk catalogue function (A worthless item one can turn off). This trolls your hard drive to make searching for items allegedly faster (though I have not noticed any speed decrease since I turned it off).
To turn off this catalogue function. Open explorer, find the drive and right click, under properties (General) is a check box for "Allow indexing service to ... for fast disk searching" - uncheck that, and you have better general performance, with only a slight (IMHO) slwdown in searching.

Xp tends to do these things in "idle" mode - and it seems to consider a full-screen DirectX game "idle mode" (it is blind to the process?), whereas 98 did not.

Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I've had the same problems as described in earlier posts, but the sound problem has been solved (deleted the mmswitch.ax).

The problem with the game going 'slow' might be solved by changing the delay time in the Misc options, at least it did for me!

Yorick
(New to this forum)

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

What kind of file is mmswitch.ax?

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

try a search of the forum on "mmswitch" - the main thread where this is mentioned is here post

Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Well, I´ve never experienced a single crash, though I have audio "hicups" now and then mostly during attacks, and sometimes the game seems like about to crash or freeze because of these, but it hasn´t yet. They appear about 1 time in every 6 or 7 attacks.

However I would like to fix these hicups but I don´t know a single thing about programing, codecs, drivers or whatever. Attached is my dxdiag print, I hope you Andy or someone could take a look at it and tell me if there´s something wrong or what can I do to improve my audio performance in order to fix the issue I´m talking about. I know I have the latest driver installed for my machine.

I would like to fix the issue without converting to WAV, because I know it must be a configuration issue only, because the game runs without this issue on my sisters, and I know my machine is better.

I tried turning off the mmswitch.ax thing but I got the "can´t find the module" window, meaning I don´t have that aplication.

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

"attacks" means what exactly - when your antivirus pops up a hacker warning?. When you shoot at something in the game?.

Hmmm (thinking cap on) does your sister's machine have Nero installed (it is mainly a CD burning package, but does all sorts of other things including audio and video playback now I think? - anyway there are loads of Nero items in that file that do not seem to me to be about simply CD-burning!!). If not - and you have the Nero installation CD to reinstall it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif! - maybe try uninstalling Nero and see what happens?

Myself - I would go the goldwave route, and convert to WAV as it is a Windows native format, even if it is larger in terms of disk space impact. MP3 on Windows seems to cause too much grief to bother, if one is using it for mult-voice sound streams, as several third party replacement CODECS (or some integrated or low end sound cards) seem to only handle single MP3 streams. Which is OK for watching a movie or playing a song, but not for games.

We issued WW2 with WAV format sound instead of MP3 because of this (and added 50 or so MB of bloat to a ~100 MB installer).

The WinSPMBT sound system will also handle any other windows standard sound format, so .wma, .mid etc should work fine if you have problems with WAV. But we have only had one report of problems with WAV - that person (WW2 user) solved it with conversion to .wma.

Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Andy:

Attack means shooting at something or taking shots in the game. I have NOD32 virus protection, and I always disable it before playing.

Both laps (my sister and mine) have Nero installed and I don´t have the instalation CD. Is there any way to disable it just like I do with AV without unistalling? I just make sure it isn´t on the task manager, haven´t been able to find another way.

I didn´t know about ww2 sounds been relased in WAV format, I thought the extra size was because of the new scenarios, and now that you mention ww2 has been running smoothly.

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Playing WinSPMBT (the cd version) since it arrived. No crashes until today. Playing a email game, ended my turn and whilst watching the opponents artillery land (not fast artillery) get a windows error message "WinVFX8.dll" performed an illegal operaion! Send/not send to microsoft?

Unfortunately, I have no other info, I could attach my turn file to this post (Obviously, I`ll need to post the password for the file as well) I`ll happily do this is it helps.

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I would suggest if this is the one and only time your computer has crashed while a game was in progress then perhaps it was something else running in combination with the game that caused a conflict which caused the crash. Computers are not bullet prove. Things happen. Once in awhile mine won't load all the background programs at start up and hangs up. It happens. There is nothing to debug unless this happens every single time you try to end your turn.

Don

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Thanks for the reply, thats what I was putting it down too, just an unfortunate series of events that led to the one off crash.

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

As it is WinVFX that crashed

a) It is an external library, that handles all the GFX. So I cannot debug or change it any. (I do have the source, but the main code is in Microsoft assembler, and the version of MASM is old, and seems no longer obtainable).

b) If it is WinVFX that is dying, that points to something to do with DirectX, or your video card etc. Possibly video RAM left locked by a previous game?

One point to mention with DirectX, is that it is often not a good idea to play game A, then attempt play game B in the same session without first rebooting your PC.

This is especialy true with any game that crashed - which I find a common occurence with Civilisation IV (or whatever the latest version is), it is crash city with ATI based cards it seems! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif. Even with a 128MB card, it crashes with a complaint about "insufficient video RAM". When it does so, it seems to have left all the video memory on the card locked, and so other games (or anything else wanting to use accelerated graphics) complain. Any save game will then load and usually play OK after a reboot of the PC, so I suspect a leak where parts of the VRAM (or off screen RAM used for video work ?) are being left locked, as this one appears towards the end of long sessions of play usually.

I also find that it is best to reboot the PC after a session of Sims2 as well, crash or no crash, if wanting to play another game.

Just as a matter of interest - had you done any graphics card intensive stuff or directX or video media (e.g. playing video will use DirectX or Directshow/play with e.g windows media Player thingy) in the same session (since reboot) before loading up that game that crashed?.

Any media players active in the background (Including say a streaming video web page)?. It is not the best of ideas to try any sort of directX game with a media player session (or web page with streaming stuff) in the background. They may well reserve VRAM even if "idle". So both applications will be "fighting" for the same resources most likely!. (and a streaming webpage will probably not be idle, even if minimised to the task bar). Possibly includes RSS feeds and so on.

Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

ok i havent read all 6 pages, but i've tried the possible fix from the first posting of this thread:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...o=&fpart=1
...without success

like some other user(s) with sound problems, i too have an onboard soundcard (c-media).
the game plays allright without sound, but it will crash to desktop after a minute or so when sound is played. the 2.5 patch didnt help either..

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

then it is higly possible your sound card cannot play multiple MP3 sound streams.

We changed WW2 to use WAV format, because several low-spec cards seemed unable to handle multiple simultaneous MP3. Try downloading WW2, and see if the probem goes away. if so - you will need to convert the sound files to WAV, and convert the INI file as described elsewhere in here (do a forum search on goldwave).

Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

well ppl i'll just say this in DirectX mode it flashes and goes negtive view. when i turn it to the GDI mode it works fine (on a side note i do got the lates DirectX.) just leting you know what works for me

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

Game guide, section "Tuning your Machine" , paragraph beginning "Unlike many full screen DirectX games, we allow you to ALT-TAB out to the desktop from Full Screen DirectX mode..." refers.

Cheers
Andy

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I have my winspmbt ver 2.51 crash during pbem. In scenario mode it works fine.
I have tried the most common "tricks" to get it to work, like turning sound and fx off, playing in windowed mode and changing the resolution, adjusting the mouse click etc.

The problem is, that I can start a turn normally, and then, usually when moving a unit, or targeting with a unit, is just crashes. I get this error message:
-----
error signature:

AppName: winspmbt.exe AppVer: 1.0.3.5 ModName: winvfx8.dll
ModVer: 0.0.0.0 Offset: 000089b4
-----
I'm using the same version as my opponent.

I'm using a Fujitsu Siemens 1510-13 (2 months old)laptop with an atiradeon 1100 graphics card.

I have been trying to solve this for a couple of weeks now, and I'm running out of ideas. I don't want to quit pbem:ing this game!!

Any ideas?

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

What operating system are you using ??

Have you turned of any screen savers , virus scanners etc etc that may be on your machine??

You report you are using version 2.51 which I assume is becasue of this PBEM that keeps failing. Have you tried playing after patching to 3.0 ??

Don

Re: Game Crashes and flashing screens
 

I'm using WinXP. But thanks a lot, your advice solved the problem. I upgraded to 3.0 ver and it works like a dream. I'm so happy ;-)))