Originally posted by Grandmaster B
bullshit is all i can say... i dont buy this crap about fucked up drivers no more. i've played disciples 2 again for the heck of it and had no problems whatsover. i return to hoi and i get my 1 ctd or more/minute again. yea right its my computer huh? no this game has gotta be bugged beyond windows standarts... shit playing this game is the most frustrating thing i've ever done. i dont think i can deal with these ctds no more. if i were still using win98 and i'd get reboots instead of ctds, i woulda smashed the cd long before now
If you buy it or not, but VIA's mobo drivers do have problems. I own a KT266A based mobo myself, and have determined (through trial and error, exhaustively testing every combination of drivers and options. And yes, that has taken months) that the VIA AGP and IDE drivers will make my system extremely unstable. This won't manifest itself in CtD's though. The system will simply freeze -> Infinite Loop error.
By not installing the VIA drivers (and let the OS/video driver defaults handle the AGP and IDE), my system instantly turns into a rock solid platform.
CtD's are an entirely different kind of animal. In Paradox games, they are caused by exceptions, thrown by the Microsoft C++ runtime library (the development platform used by Paradox to create the games), which, in turn, receives them from the OS. The response they have implemented is to simply abort the running application (aka the game) without displaying any info regarding the exception. By using two PC's, and the Borland Remote Debugger (I own Borland CppBuilder 5 myself), I have verified that almost always the exception is an Access Violation, on the rare occasions I do get a CtD (it's more frequent in EU2 than in HoI btw.). In other words, something, somewhere in the game's context is referring to a memory location it isn't supposed to.
If it were soley the game's code that was causing the access violations, then everybody playing HoI would suffer a CtD every 5 minutes or so. Luckily, that isn't the case
Therefore, the problems must be related to your particular hardware platform, or driver (combination). My bet is on the video driver. Believe it or not, but games like HoI and EU2 put a lot of stress on the video board/driver, especially in the memory management department.
Jan Peter