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D2 Crashing
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Posted by: jrpm
Ever since installing D2 I have had intermitant crashes. About 2 weeks ago I upgraded my machine (from a 266P2 w/128M W98 to 2-1gP3's with 1G ram W2K).
D2 ran fine for about 2 weeks but now gives access violations (System Error 5) anywhere from 1 minute to 1 hour into the game.
I am a newbie at gaming, but an old hand techie.
Any ideas what is happening? Or what questions I should be asking?
Posted by: glock
Standard first question is, Which motherboard are you using? <IMG SRC="smilies/tongue.gif" border="0">
If it's a VIA based board, download the newest VIA 4-in-1 Drivers. There's a link on the left side of the OTS home page.
Also, perhaps review the other posts regarding similar D2 crashing issues, and see if those solutions are applicable.
Posted by: JANNA
i would look at the ram first with that much ram u may have a bad stick in there and i faintly remember reading about comps with extremely large ammounts of ram having trouble with D2 not sure tho but i would try popping it down a bit and see what happens. i would try running some exhaustive memmory testing and see if any bad spots turn up and check the heat levels of the cpus. if ur not using a intel board for ur dual cpu i would also look for a bios update. also check ur vid card maker for newest drivers. thats where i would start in trying to trouble shoot
Posted by: jrpm
Thanks for the help.
I work with some large db's and one rdbms software company has had some problems with large system memory, I guess D2 can.
Unfortunately, I can't cut back on the RAM. The machine also has my prototyping dbms's on it and they need at least 512M and prefer the 1G. The POST says the sticks are good and nothing else is having a memory hit.
I do need to revisit the driver issue, but the machine is only 3 weeks old and has all the Win2K SP2 yada yada patches.
Seeing some comments by others about crashing since installing the latest patch, I tried uninstalling and installing an unpatched version. Crashed on open.
There seems to be more of this going around than I thought.
Posted by: JANNA
the post is merely a superficial check to see if the memmory actually works it doesnt test to see if certain parts or bit patterns which are commonly used by the system to store info are writing to bad locations. if ur doing a lot proffessional stuff and just bought all that ram i would strongly advise u to get a good memmory diagnostic proggy. ive had many memmory chips that run fine on 90% of proggies and have only one or two proggies crash ive run tests on the chips and found out that the memmory had bad areas. D2 is very poorly written and supersensitive to any faults and is very intolerant of drivers and hardware in certain configurations. bad memmory is a very common cause of game failures lockups and is often overlooked leaving windows or the program ur trying to run to blame. but anyway i would check for updated drivers, new bios, remove any HD disk compression if ur using it, and invest in a decent diagnostic program for CPU and Memmory, and check ur case for overheating especially with dual CPU. i still use an old DOS 5.0 based memmory/system utility of which only the memmory utility is still of any use  im not a huge fan of dual CPU boards that are not from intel since it is a very difficult thing to do correctly for the small time board makers like ASUS and Abit who to make matters worse put VIA chipsets on em... not sure if that is what ur using or not but those are some of the areas i would check. it could all be heat related too. heat is another huge cause of random lockups page faults second only to overclocking as a leading cause.
<FONT COLOR="#D5E6E1" SIZE="1">[ May 22, 2001 07:31 AM: Message edited by: JANNA ]</font>
Posted by: jrpm
I think I am safe on everything but your emphasize VIA chips. My mainboard is not Intel, but I trust the folks I got it from as of equal quality, now except for the VIA chips. I think it uses them for sound. Anyway the sound is on the mainboard.
Should I be considering a sound card instead?
I have not preivously heard of VIA. Are they a problem?
Posted by: Chako
Sometimes they are a little temperamental with driver issues, but I must stress that Intel chipsets are not any better in my opinion. Intel has made some gawd awful chipsets in the past. Janna tends to be a little too pro intel, and that is ok, but then not all Via chipsets suck either. Your call. It all comes down to preference.
Posted by: JANNA
onboard sound may be the cause try disabling the sound and playing without sound for abit before u spend loot on a soundcard. if it still occurs with the onboard sound disabled then u know it isnt that without spending the money
Posted by: jrpm
I can't say I blame Janna. Ordinarily, I favor Intel, but when I went to order this systems unit, I was originally going to get a P4. They were not going to be available here for a while, so we got to talking about dual P3's, etc. We all know the story.....
I'll try disabling the sound.
I suspect it has something to do with the way Blizzard randomizes things. Their debug document lists a 'seed' value (different for each of my crashes) that is 10 digits. I can think of lots of problems that could cause, from using an unsigned long in routine a passed to a signed long in routine b and a float in routine c (I always get two exception errors.) Been there, been bit by that.
When I get the time (probably this weekend), I'll try to disable sound and see.
Posted by: jrpm
Just an update to help the future. (Someday I won't be a newbie and all.)
Today I tried playing D2 again for the first time in about 5 days. There has been a change to my system. I had to downgrade my SCSI card to a 2930. The 'better card' I origninally had would not talk to my two scsi drives (and may have fried my jazz, but that is not certain.) The techs I had look at the machine (the guys I bought it from) took two days to figure out what was wrong.
Anyway, 6 hours of D2 withouth a failure. Before I could not go 6 minutes.
I figure my problem was one of two things:
1- the randomizing seed algorithm got beyond its pesky sequence, at least for a while
or
2-the top of the line scsi was s***wing my system.
It will be interesting to see which it is.
Thanks again everyone. I may lurk.
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