Occasional Crashes to Desktop

[unmerged(20077)]

The game sometimes crashes to the desktop with no warning; no error message appears and the game doesn't seem to slow or stop, it just dumps me back to the desktop. The problem has happened with more than one game and so doesn't seem to be associated with a particular saved game file.
System
Celeron 300 (I know; part of the archaeological record now)
128MB RAM
32MB VRAM Creative CT6983
DirectX 8.0
EU2 v1.07 installed on E: drive 1.3GB free space, 293MB free space remaining on Drive C:

 

[Castellon]

First thing to try is renaming your AVI folder to AVI_back.

 

[unmerged(20077)]

The one thing I didn't mention is that this is Windows 98, not XP

 

[unmerged(20077)]

...and it seems to have done more harm than good. The crash happened again after only a few months.

 

[Castellon]

I assure you it would not hurt!, please leave it renamed while we try and solve this.

Make sure you have the latest drivers for it. 90% of problems are video card related.

 

[unmerged(20077)]

Hmm... as far as I can tell there are no more updated drivers for the video card with a later date than the ones I currently have (which is back in 1999). I normally run the game with music turned off.
Could it be a graphics acceleration problem? I know that caused some problems with Civ 3 (spit!) locking up.

 

[unmerged(20077)]

Wait - I think it may have been due to a corrupted Monarchs file - I must have accidentally made a change when viewing it. This last crash seemed to happen as Radu cel Frumos was about to succeed Vlad Tepes as ruler of my country, Wallachia. Editing back seems to stop this 1462 crash... now to see if the avi_back fix works generally.

 

[unmerged(20077)]

Aargh! It hasn't. Crashed again late 1463 or early 1464.

 

[Castellon]

I would say your system is now below Min specs for the game. Your system barely met the min specs when the game was released, many graphics sound and events have been added since.
Therefore I would try and minimize the requirments by for example turning the sound off, playing at the slowest speed ...

Adjusting your Video acceleration is a good thing to try, this has been known to solve some problems.

 

[Castellon]

I would also recommend a fresh install, since you have changed one file by mistake maybe others have been corrupted as well.

 

[unmerged(20077)]

The corrupt file thing is fixed, it was down to the Monarchs file not matching the savegame info on Monarchs. I'll tweak the graphics acceleration. I play with the music turned off usually anyway, but I'm not sure I've the patience to sit through it playing at minimum speed. I'd need to play the game while reading a book!

 

[Castellon]

Well it take a while to recover from a crash as well.

 

[unmerged(20077)]

The game seems a bit happier with 800x600 res rather than 1024x768. Scrolling is smoother and it hasn't crashed as soon.

 

[Castellon]

Lower res, and lower color depth, reduce demand on the CPU especially if the Video card does not have a seperate proccessor for them.