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May 4, 2001
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I'm among those who has had major crash problems in recent months. I was running EU on an Athlon 850 with 192 MB of RAM and lots of HD space, with Windows ME, so I figured I was okay. Last night I upgraded to 384 MB of RAM and presto, I've gone 30 years in the Grand Campaign without a single crash. Before the upgrade I couldn't get more than a couple years without crashing.

I had suspected that memory was a problem before, but now I'm sure of it. The EU box says 64 MB are required and 128 MB are recommended, but obviously more than that is needed, at least in some cases. Just and FYI for those of you having problems.

I still have trouble with the music, but I can live without that if I don't crash constantly.
 
I opgraded from 64 til 192, and my problems were solved. I only have a pentium 333, so I don't understand, why you had a problem in the first place. Maybe it is not only the memory.
 
Agreed that it doesn't make a lot of sense how different machines react so differently. Just thought I'd pass along my experiences since they probably match that of some others.

I did some further experimenting and when I speeded up to 1 minute equals 1 year, I started getting crashes on a pretty regular basis. I then slowed down to either 1 minute equals 4 or 8 months and the crashes disappeared. I had my system monitor running in the background and even when it crashed there was some available physical memory, which surprised me. The CPU was running 100 percent the whole time, but I'm not sure if that would relate to the crashes. Looks like at least on my machine, I just have to run the program slower and it will be ok. Of course I'll have to wait until I get later into a GC, since a lot of people experience more problems later in the game.
 
My PC consists of an intel BX chipset, 192 MB RAM and a Celeron 300A, overclocked to 450 MHz.

Upto now, I haven't had any stability issues. I can run the game for hours, without crashing, although the fastest I have set the game speed to is 8 months a minute.

However, unless the game uses multi threading, gamespeed settings should be pretty much irrelevant when it comes to timing related crashes.

I must admit, however, that I don't know for a fact whether or not EU uses multi threading.
 
It may be that it is indirectly linked to timing issues inside Windows itself. The Windows kernel is multi threading.

When you increase the game speed, and Windows must access the swap file while the game runs, that may well cause the problems.

I know for a fact that all non Windows NT/Win2K versions get into trouble when the swap ratio (ie the number of pages per second accessed on disk) gets too high.

So, when EU, while running, causes Windows to swap to and from disk, the swapping rate increases when the game speed is set higher. If this pushes the swapping ratio over the critical threshold, it may well cause the crashes you encounter.

What I have done to minimize the risk of this problem/bug/"feature", is to download the CacheBooster program, made by AnalogX (www.analogx.com)

With this program you can reduce the amount of memory Windows reserves upon booting for it's hard disk cache. Less memory for cache == more memory for everthing else !

This should free up a considerable amount of memory. On my system, back in the days I had only 128 MB installed, Windows had reserved a hefty 64 MB for a hard disk cache. Together with memory reserved by the kernel and device drivers (12 MB for the Creative Live!, for example), this left a meager 20 MB out of the 128 MB where applications could make use of.

Reducing the hard disk cache size to a mere 4 MB gave me an instant 80 MB of physical RAM available, greatly reducing the burden on the swap file, and thus increasing overall system stability.

This may very well work for you too.
 
Not really, if you otherwise would be forced to use/expand the swap file. What happens in the Windows kernel is this:

The application needs more RAM than is available. Instead of shrinking the hard disk cache size, Windows *increases* the swap file.

Now it starts paging memory chunks to the swap file. And guess what, it moves these thunks through the hard disk cache ! So, the memory pages move from RAM to RAM to disk.

When you reduce the cache size, the need to swap reduces. And when swapping is actually needed, it moves from RAM directly to disk.

In short, by reducing the cache size, you reduce on the number of redundant kernel operations. :)
 
I run this game on a 450MHz with 64MB and i never crash. Honestly my game has never crashed, I change speed with no problem at all. The only thing I have noticed is that 1min to 16 months (is that the highest speed?) is slower than 1min to 8 months. This is due to the fact that time stops and starts, and jumps foward, etc etc.
 
Originally posted by SideshowBob
I run this game on a 450MHz with 64MB and i never crash. Honestly my game has never crashed, I change speed with no problem at all.
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Well, with only 64 MB, Windows allocates only a small hard disk cache all by itself. This will therefore automatically leave sufficient RAM.

Also, it helps if you are not using a Soundblaster Live!, and are still using Windows 95, instead of the later incarnations.

Finally, using a separate video board instead of an integrated one also leaves more main RAM available to applications.

The only thing I have noticed is that 1min to 16 months (is that the highest speed?) is slower than 1min to 8 months. This is due to the fact that time stops and starts, and jumps foward, etc etc.
Click to expand...

This can very well be caused by increased swapping. A higher game speed means the game accesses all of it's memory more frequently. If you increase it beyond a certain swapping ratio, your system will effectively loose more speed due to disk access than it gains by reducing the idle time. The fact that the game seems to stop and start is also a strong indication for this.
 
Is it better than Cacheman? I've used Cacheman since a year or so and I like it.


About the speed thing: at one minute=1year, when a lot of things happen simultaniously (like a war with a dozen participants) the time slows down, slower than 1min=1month.

And now that I think about it, I always had crash at high speed, 1min=1year. With 1.08, it was when a special event happenned and a box poped-up. Now, I'ts anytime things are going well :(

Why don't I have a crash when P-L and Turkey are beating is a wonder :confused: Now, that would give me a good excuse to reload an earlier game...:)
 
Originally posted by viper37
Is it better than Cacheman? I've used Cacheman since a year or so and I like it.
Click to expand...
Since I have no experience with CacheMan, I wouldn't know. However, all CacheBooster really does, is changing the Windows Registry, so it comes up with the cache size you have specified, instead of some silly really large one it wants by default.

I guess CacheMan does something similar. If so, it should make no difference.
 
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