X-com crashes in XP

[Olympia]

I used to play the Old dos version of UFO EU - worked fine om my old '486. :inlove:

 

Now I have the collectors edition, but both UFO EU and TFTD crashes back to winXP on a regular basis. I get no error message. Just the plain XP screen.

 

I am playing on a 350 hz PII machine, with updated bios, and updated drivers for my various cards.

 

The game plays nicely for ½ an hour or so, and then crashes.Usually during a mission, but sometimes at the goesphere.

 

Most of the X-com / XP post i have seen, have concerned graphics, which is not a problem for me.

 

I have read through lots of posts concerning crashes, and XP problems, but haven't seen any solutions. Could this be right? Is the collectors edition just a bad piece of software?

 

I haven't changed any settings. Neither i xp or X-com.

 

Is there anything I can do?, or should I just resign, and forget about playing X-com? :o :hmmm:

[NKF]

The crashes are regular. You'll always get crashes. And there are hundreds of reasons for the crashes. These crashes go way back to the original dos versions of the games. They're sort of like the blue screens of death/general protection faults, only not so severe. Basically, the old bugs were kept when they ported the game to windows, and their effects have been made worse.

 

You see, the original dos version ran on two executables (for the geoscape and battlescape), so when one crashed, the game will often progress straight on to the other. Examples of such crashes: you might have noticed sometimes the Geoscape suddenly stops and returns you to a previous mission, or during a mission, it suddenly ends (often with big text scrolling down the screen) and you end up winning the mission with the score from a previous mission. Etcetera. The real magic comes from the fact that the main game loop is run inside a batch file.

 

The collectors edition makes the old bugs worse, since they never fixed them, and they combined both of the geoscape and tactical executables into one. So when one part of the program fails, the whole program fails and you get dumped back to your OS. This is also the reason for the CE specific proximity mine bug.

 

You'll just have to deal with the crashes. They shouldn't happen too frequently after a while. Most of the time they just go away. Just remember to save often, preferably before or just after important battles.

 

If it persists (especially when you perform certain actions), I'd highly recommend uninstalling the game and do a fresh install. Or you could install a second copy under a different directory name.

 

- NKF

[Olympia]

thx. Tough Luck. I keep saving, but every time a play a game, it crashes at a point where I can't be bothered to replay the last bit up until the crash.

 

Basically what you are saying is, that there is no hope, and we can't ever expect our x-coms to run without frequent crashes.

[NKF]

It's best to always keep in mind that a crash can happen at any time. Though worry not. Sometimes you can go for hours on end without a single crash. At other times it keeps happening. If you do manage to play for an hour or more, you might want to exit the game and restart it from time to time. It often helps clear up potential crashes.

 

I just wish they'd release the source code to the public domain. I'd really like to take a shot at fixing some of the bugs - I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way, no?

 

- NKF