Game Crashes and flashing screens

[Mobhack]

Guderdian said:
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

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

[Pepper]

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.

[Mobhack]

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 !. 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

[Yorick]

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)

[RVPERTVS]

What kind of file is mmswitch.ax?

[Mobhack]

RVPERTVS said:
What kind of file is mmswitch.ax?

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

Cheers
Andy

[RVPERTVS]

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