Crash Detected

R-Tag · January 18, 2001, 18:26

I've been ran SMAC on my computer for about a month with no problems. Now, all of a sudden it's crashing every second. The error I get is "terran.exe" (or terranx.exe depending on which game I'm running) has performed an illegal opperation. The details are a bunch of hex-decimals. Usually this is followed by a number of "fatal exceptions" (blue errors) in seemingly random files such as vcash.vxd, dfs.vxd, vfat1, and a number of other files as well. A total system crash may or may not follow the blue errors. In any case, I can't run either SMAC or SMACX on my system for longer than a few minuites before I crash. No other games have this problem. I tried re-installing the games a few times. No luck. Can someone help me out here before I do something drastic like re-format my HD?

BTW, I'm running an AMD Athalon 950 mega hz processor with a Annihalator 3D card, sound blaster platnum, and 128 MB SD RAM. Does SMAC or SMACX have any known conflicts with any of those devices? I have a wheel mouse; I did read something (I can't remember where I saw this) about a possible conflict there. But I doubt any of this is the problem as I did run the program smoothly for a month before all of this mayham began (although the occasional lock up did occour. But, that happens even on the other computers.)

stuntman19 · January 18, 2001, 21:02

I'm assuming the wheel mouse is the source of your problem, several others have had similar probs.

R-Tag · January 18, 2001, 22:50

Well, so far I've done this:

1. Reinstalled win 98. no fix.
2. Ran the game without the modem (you never know). no fix.
3. Ran the game without the sound card. no fix.
4. Reduced the resolution to 1024x765x8. no fix.

Things I have yet to try:

1. Disabeling the wheel mouse
2. Defraging the HD (don't think this would even help)
3. Disableing the sound.dll file

I'm to tired to think anymore. I've been working on the problem all night. Looks like I may actually have to format because I can't figure out what's gone wrong, and I suspect that it may not even be with the game since I was running it fine until recently. But, I still have some options, and I'm not giving up just yet. How do I disable the wheel mouse for Alpha Centauri, btw? Do I have to disable it for the entire computer, or is there a file in the game that controls this that I can edit?

Thx guys!

stuntman19 · January 19, 2001, 01:02

I believe if you press CTR-ALT-DEL and then disable the task EM_EXEC that will do the job. I don't have a wheel mouse on the PC I have smac\x on, but I think that should do it.

RedFred · January 19, 2001, 02:04

Odd how it worked, then it didn't. Any hardware or software changes at the time it started crashing?

fluffy · January 19, 2001, 06:56

Norton Crashguard will intercept the crashes and allow you to continue playing - not a solution, but a work-around...

R-Tag · January 19, 2001, 11:49

quote:

Originally posted by RedFred on 01-19-2001 01:04 AM
Odd how it worked, then it didn't. Any hardware or software changes at the time it started crashing?

I did add an Ethernet Card that was causing the system some major problems. It was my first asupmtion that the Ethernet card was the source of all the trouble because the game never crashed before I installed it, but, I took the card out and deleted all the drivers, etc. from the computer. It didn't fix anything.

Since removing the Ethernet card I have re-installed windows a few times to no avail. As of this post I have not attempted to disable the mouse (going to do that in a moment.)

cbn · January 19, 2001, 12:59

Redfred

The inconsistency of crashing sometimes no longer surprises me. My game of Smax crashes about 30% of the time on startup but never if I can actually get to the screen that allows me to choose between Classic and Crossfire.

Often I have started my computer and then done nothing other than start Smac/x (so in theory nothing different should be running that whatever programs run onn each and every startup). If Smac crashes I know from experience (up to 10 attempts on a couple of occasions) that the game will crash again and again. The solution is simply to restart the computer and then start Smac/x in exactly the same way. In most cases the game then works with no problems. Sometimes a second reboot is necessary and I believe it happened once that a third reboot led to a successful start.

While this is a PIA sometimes I've gotten to the point where I find it amusing. I think of the AI as intelligent enough to be trying to pre-empt the beating it knows is coming-- LOL. However I haven't had the game crash while actually playing in over a year.

big_canuk · January 19, 2001, 14:30

See the thread "Pentium IV" for another possible fix. It worked for me.

R-Tag · January 21, 2001, 16:59

Well, it's official. It's all broken. I've spent all week-end trying to stop SMACX from crashing. I've tried it all. I've disabled the wheelmouse, played around with the resolution, defragmented, re-installed, scan-disked, all I can possibly imagin to do and STILL IT'S CRASHING!!!!

I've reached the area where the frustration is little more than a cold lump in my chest.

Tonight, I format.

THX guys.

Darius · January 21, 2001, 17:49

Try this before launching the game:

Press ctrl-alt-del to get the task list. Highlight "MSWHEEL" and click "End Task".

Helium Pond · January 21, 2001, 19:01

I doubt this will help, but you never know:

I found that the terranx.exe crash seems to get tied to a particular square or squares, in a particular saved game. If I want to play a saved game, but I get the terranx.exe crash, sometimes I can avoid it by just losing a turn--if I click on Turn Complete before all my units have moved, and then click yes when it asks me if I really mean it, I can usually play the following turns without trouble. For some reason I only seem to get the terranx.exe crash on the first turn after loading a saved game. If I can make it to the second turn, I'm fine.

Just something you might want to try, if you haven't already. I hope you don't have to re-format your hard drive.

Sparky · January 21, 2001, 19:21

Restarting alone doesn't guerantee a "fresh" beginning. Three years ago I had a P1MMX 200 with Win95. It started up in the oddest way: it
ALWAYS crashed the first two times you started windows. It ALWAYS worked the third time, and each time it failed it got a few seconds closer to loading all the way.

Weird. That old computer fried several months ago, though.

R-tag: one huge factor you haven't mentioned yet is what operating system? Forget Win98. Forget Millenium Edition. Get Win2000. It's extremely stable. I'm running it on a system very similar to yours, Athlon 700 thunderbird, 128 Ram, Soundblaster live. I have no stability problems at all. Even if by some act of Statan it did crash SMAC, everything else would run fine!

(The only downside, though, is that Win2000 initializes some games slowly. SMACX takes a while to load, but SMAC is instant)

R-Tag · January 22, 2001, 01:44

I tried disableing the wheelmouse, and after reading a few threads about the terran.exe crash being related to a square, I did some experamenting. I did discover that that was true. In a few instances, if I moved a unit into a diffrent square, the crash did not occour. However, there were many more instances where that simply failed entierly. Besides, what if it was an enemy unit that I could not control?

I didn't have time to format tonight. Too much other stuff to do. But, I'm certian I'll have to now. I think that the probem might be virus related. Although I can't seem to detect any, all of my word processing programs were mysteriously deleted. It could be that all my insane modifications did it; I just don't know anymore. Tired of fighting it. I can't figgure out why the game is crashing, and I'm just becoming frustrated. I even ran the game with nothing in the background except explorer. To make things even more puzzling is the question of why all of this just started to happen two weeks ago. I've had this computer for 5 mo. and it's the first time I've had problems like this.

I am running Win98. I've heard varying reviews about Win2000. Seems to me that it's just Microsoft's latest beta platform. In any case, I just don't have the money to invest in a new OS right now.

Anyhow, thanks for all your concern. I wish i didn't have to format either

Oh, this may be 1 last potshot, but, I did manage to make the systme a little more stable than it was before, and now when I get a blue "fatal error" after terran(x).exe crashes, it's always in VxD now. Beforehand it was in all sorts of insane files. I know this is some virtual memory file, but I'm not computer savvy enough to know exactly what it is. It is a long shot, but I probably won't be formatting until Tuesday (tommrow is going to be a tough day).