Drakan and crashing to the desktop.

[MGAuser]

Weird problem that's bugging the hell out of me. I have a G400 whether o/c'd or not Drakan crashes at least 20 times a night playing it. System specs below:

Abit BE6 ( I think this is the problem)
128MB Micron PC133 Ram
G400 Retail
SB Live! Retail
2 Quantum 13.6GB Ultra/66 HDD's
3COM 3C905TX network card.

In device manager I have nothing sharing IRQ's ir IRQ steering, parallele and serial ports all disabled to preserve IRQ's.

IRQ 11 is reserved for Video
IRQ 7 is reserved for NIC
IRQ 10 is reserved for SB Live!
USB is disabled as I do not use or need it, also SB16 emulation is disabled. My system runs fine when im not playing any types of games, however the problem with Drakan, Revolt demo, and NHL99 all seem to lock up at various places. The card it's self is not hot at all, I run with the case open. Is anyone else running Drakan and a G400 having trouble like this? I know from checking out Drakan.net that others with different video cards are having problems with crashing, but only when they try to load saved games. Any help or ideas would be appreciated, I hope to soon get my P3B-F back from repair and hope that will solve it. If not what to do next? Wait for a patch?

[merchant2112]

re enable usb as agp transfers need it on.

in darkan i fixed 90% of my crashing by turning off unchecking the following items.


1 uncheck disable vsinc

2 uncheck use 3d buffers.

also i notice you have a sb live. make sure you are useing the latest live ware 2.1 drakan.net's support forum list's that as the number 1 reason for game crashes (not haveing the latest liveware. a drakan patch is in beta testing as we speak and is to be relesed in a week or 2.

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spec's Here are some real spec's. bore dia 7.62 cartrage length 54mm(rimed) rate of fire who cares you can empty a full 30 round clip in 3 seconds, effective range with high powered scope 1500 yards. (kill's recorded at this range)who needs a cheap shot gun when you can use a russan sniper riffle to blow someones head off from half a mile away. cost 1595.00 at any gun show or special order.


[This message has been edited by merchant2112 (edited 09-01-1999).]

[cpld005]

I found out what the problem was, it seemed to me like ever since I got the Abit BE6 MOBO I had problems, slight ones mind you, occasional desktop freezes every few days (thought oh well, that's just windows 98) but after the 20 crashes in 3 hours one night in Drakan I became very suspicious of the Abit board, my old Asus P2B never crashed like that, loaded up NHL99 ( a game that never gave me fits on the Asus and G400 and it crashed left and right, so now I am thinking ok, maybe this mobo is bad. Switched it out with an Intel SE440-BX2 and guess what? no crashes in Drakan at 1024X768 32-bit color (couldn't get it to run at all on the Abit over 640V480 16-bit color) and was able to play the game to the point I was at before. No crashes, no hiccups. The abit boardf is going bye bye big time, i'd stay away from the BE6.

[surferpop]

I'm really getting disappointed.First the
card wouldn't work at all with hardware
accel. on.I then got it to work but had to force agpx1.I downloaded the unreal 225 drivers and watched my time demo go from 43 to 27.OGL is so slow it's unplayable.

But then I installed drakan.It looked absolutely fantastic and made me realize why I bought this card.It played flawlessly
thru the first level and then.........

It crashes to the desktop. And it crashes to the desktop......AND IT CRASHES TO THE DESKTOP.If I get 5 minutes of play between
crashes I'm happy.I'm so friggin frustrated I can't even play it any more.

I've looked at the drakan forum and the desktop crashing problems do not seem to be near as severe as mine and I'm beginning to think it may be the g400.My problems sound
similar to MGAuser.

And then the new drivers.What's with this?

Matrox, I'm losing faith.

If anybody has any ideas on how to get drakan to run please let me know.By the way I've tried the above suggestions with the exception of "enabling usb" ?


p2 450,192ram,intel 440bx,aureal vortex
sound card,g400max 5.13 drivers

[This message has been edited by surferpop (edited 09-02-1999).]

[Kookstick]

Surferpop- My G400 dual head worked flawlessly in the first level and then about the time I got to the second map it started crashing to the desktop over and over, I unchecked bump mapping and fix texture and was able to get thru the bad areas, It really freaked out when I found Arokh the 1st time so I had to reboot but I think the key is to save alot and turn off the eye candy to get thru the bad areas then turn it back on, it's a awesome game-I just got to this massive monster in the mines that throws boulders at you and not sure how I'm going to kill him without cheeting, anyways catch some waves for me, I surf everyday in Pacific Beach, San diego.Cheers

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Asus P2b(1010),P3 450,128 mb pc100,Matrox G400 DH,Asus 50x,Iomega zip,Mitsumi CDR,Ibm 10 gb hd,Sb Live,Win 98

[Kruzin]

I have had this problem, and been in contact with Matrox several times about it. They will be trying to reproduce the problem. I've sent them a save game that crashes on me almost every time I run it.

I'm afraid it is somehow related to the bumpmapping. Turning it off stops my crashes.

[surferpop]

Kookstick,
You've got more patience than I do.I'll
give the texture thing a try though and see if it helps any.

Do you think it's the game or the g400
or a combination of both?

I wish I could surf every day but unfortunately can only get out once or twice a week.You are one lucky dude.
My regular beach is San Onofre.I also
surf Newport and on a larger south swell, Doheny and as you may have guessed my board
is a few feet longer than I am.

[surferpop]

Kruzin,
I've turned off bump mapping on both
the game and the drivers. It still crashes to the desktop.
Please let us know what Matrox says.

[surferpop]

I turned off everything including
a3d support and made it about 15 seconds
before crashing to the desktop.
sh%#

[cpld005]

Using the latest drivers seem to have made the problem worse. I'm going back to 5.13 cause I was able to get through the entire first level without crashing, now with the 5.20 it crashes infrequently, but it didn't with 5.13 seems like a driver downdate, I wanna rebate!

[SmarmyGuy]

merchant (I think the same one from ActionXtreme) suggested turning off Disable V-sync and Bump-mapping. When I did that, I got thru the constant crashing areas with no problem. I did notice with bump-mapping on I occaisionally got rainbow effects in place of the bump-mapped areas (i.e. Arokh and water).

Using G400 DH with 5.15 drivers

[Kruzin]

Matrox has reproduced my crash to the desktop problem at least.

Turns out to be an application error, where the game is making some kind of illegal calls to kernel32.dll when freeing bumps. This seems to fit my problem, since it happens when going from non-bumped areas to bumped areas (like near Aroch).

Matrox will be in contact with Surreal about getting this fixed.

Unfortunatly, this is obviously not the same problem that is plaguing everyone, since all I have to disable is bumpmapping to get around the crashes...