problem :(

Phil Defer · November 10, 2002, 14:35

Hello ! I have installed Alpha Centauri without any problem but when I launch it, it launches but it freezes at the screen of "Firaxis Games"... and it doesn't do more

Help me please

thanks !

Phil Defer · November 10, 2002, 16:55

precision : i have Windows 98 Second Edition

Alex · November 10, 2002, 18:20

What is your processor? There is a well known problem involving Pentium 4 and some others, where the game won't recognize your processor, which may lead to a lot of problems, like crashes and the game refusing to run at all.

Try adding the line:

ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1

to your alphacentauri.ini file in the SMAC directory and see if that helps.

(I hope I have a good memory...

)

Phil Defer · November 10, 2002, 19:17

i have a celeron 500

i will try what you said

Phil Defer · November 10, 2002, 19:20

i just tried, it doesn't work

Petek · November 10, 2002, 20:12

If you don't already have it, you need to place a section header before the ForceOldVoxel... line:

[PREFERENCES]
ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1

Petek

Phil Defer · November 11, 2002, 06:43

i have tried to add this and unfortunately it still doesn't work

has anyone already had this problem ? sorry for my bad english

Mongoose · November 11, 2002, 06:52

What version are you using? IIRC, the euro releases required the CD in the drive to play. IIRC also, there were a lot of folks with Celeron sets that were having trouble. Sadly, I do not recall how to fix it.

Phil Defer · November 11, 2002, 07:42

in fact, the problem is that there is the cursor that says it works at the screen of firaxis but when i do CTRL ALT DEL it says "Alpha Cantauri" no answer...

krazykiter · November 11, 2002, 18:15

Phil,

I've experienced the same problem running SMAC and SMACX on a 2 GHz Pentium 4 under WinXP

In addition to PEtek's suggestion, you may also need Firaxis' Win2000/XP Compatibility Update.

Good Luck

Alex · November 11, 2002, 21:21

Why would he need the compatibility update? He said he is running on Win 98 SE.

johndmuller · November 12, 2002, 03:51

I have had problems where it failed to load the game in something like the manner you describe when running Win98 SE or possibly something earlier on a computer without much hardware power. Sometimes it would only start if SMAC was pretty much the first thing run after a reboot, other times it would work OK irrespective of whether or not I rebooted. I don't know if it was connected or not, but the sound was often mysteriously inactive on this computer too (it would come on if I toggled it off and on again within the game). On a different computer (also Win98 xx) it would sometimes crash on loading - this one was definitely sound related, it wouldn't happen if I disabled the sound at the operating system level (definietely a PIA) and it began after I accepted a sound driver update from Microsoft's upgrade thing. There are ways of adjusting certain things about the sound in the .ini file - something about dx3 (3D I think) and maybe something else too.

Your DirectX may not be right for whatever reason - too old, not appropriate for your hardware/software, whatever.

There is also the video driver - perhaps you could try disabling the opening movie in the .ini file.

The .ini file(s) may have bad stuff in it from following advice such as this and may be difficult to fix - I have made *correct* adjustments to it that lead to inability to start up the program and had to resort to draconian measures like copying the whole AC subdirectory from another machine. A reload might help if you have some corrupted files (personally, I hate it when someone tells me to do that, but sometimes it is more expedient to do that - it doesn't really take long and you can always back up the current one first if you don't want to lose stuff).

Summary of areas of interest:
1) Win environment - reboot before starting game, don't run too much other stuff with it, use Win2K;
2) sound - drivers, directx, .ini adjustments, turn it off in OS;
3) video - drivers, directx, .ini adjustments (disable opening movie)
4) internal game .ini, etc files - check and/or copy from good set, reload game
5) flakey CD - get no-cd version (try Googlies website) of executable
6) bad Karma - kiss and make up with Miriam
7) consult Buster's Help thread on CGN.

Sorry I didn't provide as many specifics as you might wish; hopefully you can find or figure out the references - just post if any of them are too obscure.

Good luck.

Kajak · November 12, 2002, 13:53

Just a word or two from the terran.exe crash Problem victum of his own dumbness. I agree with all the above advice, but IMHA.
1. I have xp pro, 2Gig , P4 and bunch of other stuff including a Microtex scanner ( more on this later). SMAC wouldn,t run at first either, (Ver 1.--) untill I not only unistalled it , but rooted out all the parts still there , and did a reinstall. Why it failed the first time Ihave no idea. Note again Ver. 1. as from the Jewel box.
2.. This ver (1.0something) .ini has no line in it of the nature of Forceoldv. ect. and putting it in didn't work for me..
This line does occurs in the patched .ini after u
you do the Patch 4 . The line is set equal to zero (0), changedthe zero to one (1) as so often recommeded and it ran. Thru it still gave the cpu unsupportd warning which you can blow thru.
3. Had much agony over mid game terran.exe crashes when the action in the game got very busy and suspected some kind of internal list limits. Well I was right in a sense, but totally wrong also. Any visitors had commented that my machine seemed alfully slow for such a new machine, being brand new to this I ingnored the comments. To keep it short it seems my scanned (though new also) was using an old driver that somehow was burning up vast parts of the cpu. Downloaded new driver,installed, and just completed a game where two AI's and I went to a world wide war aginst the other three A.I.s with wild wild action, long build list, lots of patrolling, ect and had no crashes.
While apocraful, perhaps these thoughts might help.

By the way can anyone tell what the new Fireaxis patch does ? Can.t tell as yet from this end.

DinoDoc · November 12, 2002, 15:52

Quote:

Originally posted by Petek
If you don't already have it, you need to place a section header before the ForceOldVoxel... line:

[PREFERENCES]
ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1

That didn't work for me. It still says that it won't recognize my processor.

Lefty Scaevola · November 12, 2002, 16:24

Quote:

Originally posted by DinoDoc
That didn't work for me. It still says that it won't recognize my processor.

At that point select ok/continue or whatever the affirmative option is. It will still give you that line even if it is capable of working with the urecognized proscessor after the preference line is added.

Petek · November 12, 2002, 21:52

Quote:

Originally posted by Phil Defer
i have tried to add this and unfortunately it still doesn't work

has anyone already had this problem ? sorry for my bad english

One other suggestion: If you haven't already done so, wait a long time at the point where the program freezes. Every once in a while, my copy of SMAX will appear to hang at startup. The keyboard and mouse won't respond. I would power off and restart. However, I found that if I waited for 5 minutes or longer, the program would eventually "wake up" and continue normally. If I had enough patience, I would follow jonhdmuller's excellent suggestions to try to fix this.

Anyway, it's worth a shot.

Petek

Phil Defer · November 13, 2002, 10:04

thank you for your help, i will try all your propositions

Kajak · November 14, 2002, 23:10

I spoke foolishly too soon above. Yes I did get a shared win in the above mentioned war, with no crash, but today I just got a terran.exe typical crash at the thinker level at about Y2370, was playing iron man so I couldtn't go back more than two turns and couldn't avoid it buy trying the stuff that helps at the first several levals. Had patch 4, had ForceOldv..ect, had the new Fireaxis patch and the darn scanner was behaving.

Sikander · November 15, 2002, 02:40

Quote:

Originally posted by Kajak
I spoke foolishly too soon above. Yes I did get a shared win in the above mentioned war, with no crash, but today I just got a terran.exe typical crash at the thinker level at about Y2370, was playing iron man so I couldtn't go back more than two turns and couldn't avoid it buy trying the stuff that helps at the first several levals. Had patch 4, had ForceOldv..ect, had the new Fireaxis patch and the darn scanner was behaving.

Were you playing SMAC or SMAX? I found that SMAX works fine when I don't install the v.4 SMAC patch on my new XP machine.

Mongoose · November 15, 2002, 11:21

?? SMAX upgrades SMAC to V4.0 upon installation.

Kajak · November 15, 2002, 12:03

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Sikander

Were you playing SMAC or SMAX?

SMACl

I't's a couple hours later and I see that I don't as yet know how to take a quote correctly, sorry.

Went back and tried to do what I could in the two turns available before the crash, cut all the build list of my 33 bases to one or two items and made piece with hive and peacekeepers.
{ I know, at thinker lever it would only buy me a few turns). This sort of keeping your head down was the key to winning at the first several levels, albeit only as transcend, while avoided the terran.exe crash that still seems to be triggered by lots of pieces running around in all directiuons.
Seems to have worked, I've, so far, got this puppy up about 70 more turns so far.

None the less, either I've got a singular problem with my machine or the newest fireaxis patch doesn't solve this problem.