Crash and mouse freeze on startup

[Owen]

Hi Castellon (and other helpful people),

I've been encountering a problem every now and again when attempting to load EU2. The symtoms are simple. I double-click on the EU2 icon on the desktop and nothing happens. The game doesn't start loading at all, but the mouse freezes in position over the icon and won't move.

The rest of the machine functions fine, and I can use the keyboard OK, suggesting that EU2 has gone down, taking the mouse driver with it.

Since it appears to be an intermittent fault, it is difficult to trace exactly what I did that might have caused the fault. Unfortunately, I've changed many things with my machine recently, including a motherboard, RAM, graphics card and processor upgrade. This has of course introduced a load of new drivers. I've also changed to Opera as a browser and introduced ZoneAlarm as a firewall.

System specs are as follows:
2600+ Athlon, Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, SB Live value sound card, Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card.
Windows 98 SE
EU2 July 23 Beta.

I removed the .AVI file months ago, since I'd seen enough of it.

Any ideas?

EDIT: I forgot. Machine normally runs at 1200x1024. I run EU2 at highest resolution, 1024x768. A useful fact is that if I press ctrl-alt-del twice, I return in a lower resolution, which I think is 1024x768, but may possibly even be 800x600, I can't be sure. This means that EU2 must be getting somewhere in the startup, even if nothing is appearing on screen.

I guess this fault happens about 1 time in 4 of loading the game.

EDIT2: I have the latest version of DirectX installed.

 

[unmerged(9404)]

Just something obvious you hopefully did, but didn’t mention: Have you tried a complete uninstall (as in one of the stickies) and reinstall of EU2?

Something other I can think of: Did you wait a while, 30 secs, before doing something? The EEP and IIRC one of the early beta patches somehow introduced a delay between the double clicking on the icon and the showing of the loading screen.

Otherwise I wouldn’t know.

 

[Castellon]

Do you have the ATI control panel in the bottom right hand corner?
What mouse are you using?
You may also want to switch from the VIA drivers to the native windows drivers.

 

[Owen]

Thanks for the replies people.

Originally posted by Ironfoundersson
Just something obvious you hopefully did, but didn’t mention: Have you tried a complete uninstall (as in one of the stickies) and reinstall of EU2?

I don't believe that to be the problem, with it being an intermittent fault, though I will try it once I've run out of other suggestions.

Something other I can think of: Did you wait a while, 30 secs, before doing something? The EEP and IIRC one of the early beta patches somehow introduced a delay between the double clicking on the icon and the showing of the loading screen.

Otherwise I wouldn’t know.

Again, if it was a deliberate change, it would always happen.

Do you have the ATI control panel in the bottom right hand corner?
What mouse are you using?
You may also want to switch from the VIA drivers to the native windows drivers.

I normally have the ATI control panel in the tool box at the bottom right. I haven't checked to see if I lose it or not. I will check next time it happens.

Mouse is a standard wired Microsoft Mouse with standard Windows 98 drivers.

Which particular VIA drivers do you mean Castellon? Come to think of it, why might this help?

 

[Castellon]

Originally posted by Owen
I normally have the ATI control panel in the tool box at the bottom right. I haven't checked to see if I lose it or not. I will check next time it happens.

Mouse is a standard wired Microsoft Mouse with standard Windows 98 drivers.

Which particular VIA drivers do you mean Castellon? Come to think of it, why might this help?

VIA drivers are proven to be buggy! If you had XP you would be out of luck, but with 98 or ME you can change them.

ATI program has caused some problems for others, shut it down before playing.

 

[Owen]

Originally posted by Castellon
VIA drivers are proven to be buggy! If you had XP you would be out of luck, but with 98 or ME you can change them.

ATI program has caused some problems for others, shut it down before playing.

Thanks Castellon, I'll try that.

 

[Owen]

I still don't understand what VIA drivers you're talking about though. The A7N8X uses the nVidia chipset.

 

[Owl]

Originally posted by Owen
[....]
EDIT: I forgot. Machine normally runs at 1200x1024. I run EU2 at highest resolution, 1024x768. A useful fact is that if I press ctrl-alt-del twice, I return in a lower resolution, which I think is 1024x768, but may possibly even be 800x600, I can't be sure. This means that EU2 must be getting somewhere in the startup, even if nothing is appearing on screen.
[...]

I think the fact that it comes back as 800 x 600 is nothing to do with EU2 - just a coincidence. 800 x 600 seems to be the default setting under W98, along with the "High Color 16 " setting. If our PC crashes it often comes back with the default display settings and those really big old-fashioned looking icons ....

 

[Owen]

Re: Re: Crash and mouse freeze on startup

Originally posted by Owl
I think the fact that it comes back as 800 x 600 is nothing to do with EU2 - just a coincidence. 800 x 600 seems to be the default setting under W98, along with the "High Color 16 " setting. If our PC crashes it often comes back with the default display settings and those really big old-fashioned looking icons ....

Well yes, but when I get a normal CTD from EU2 it also does the same thing, suggesting that part of EU2 has managed to start at least.

 

[Castellon]

It is your CPU not the mother board.
You can PM jpd he is my resident expert on VIA driver problem. I have never used them since I am on Intel systems.

 

[jpd]

Owen got it right. He doesn't have nor need to have the VIA drivers installed. The Asus A7N8X does indeed use the NVidia nForce chipset, and thus needs the nVidia unified driver set.

The Asus A7V8X (notice: a V instead of an N) uses a VIA chipset.

From what I have read so far, it sounds like a DirectX initialisation failure.

Try running DxDiag, and let it check all aspects of the DirectX installation. Make sure you run DirectX 9.0b or higher, as the original distribution was a little buggy.

Which version of the Catalist drivers are you using?

Jan Peter

 

[Castellon]

Originally posted by jpd
Owen got it right. He doesn't have nor need to have the VIA drivers installed. The Asus A7N8X does indeed use the NVidia nForce chipset, and thus needs the nVidia unified driver set.

The Asus A7V8X (notice: a V instead of an N) uses a VIA chipset.

Ahh, thanks for the education, I thought they were associated with the AMD CPUs not the motherboard, since no one with an Intel CPU system has them.