Before I start, yes I've checked the faq and done a search. I don't have the drivers that causes the usual access violations.


Here's what I get.



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Sorry for bad quality, saved 'em in too low a quality.


Anyhow, my comps been having alot of BSOD's (blue screens of death), with numerous errors like 'page area fault', 'bad pool caller', 'irql not less than equal' and numerous others, sometimes related to win32k.sys and ntfs.sys . I'm still having these troubles but it's all pointing towards my ram, which Memtest86 reports being f***ed. Along the process of trying to fix my crap pc, i did a system restore to a month ago. Thats when Soldat stopped working.

Still, the drivers and hardware and pretty much everything haven't changed since the time of the restore, nor for the past year i've had this pc.

I've a P4 2.2ghz with 512mb ddr ram, a geforce 3 64mb gfx card, and a soundblaster pci 128. Whats the reason for these errors in Soldat? other games seem to work fine, and i've tried various options in the setup.exe of Soldat to troubleshoot the problem...all the same errors.

Chances are, its the mixture of your bad RAM, as you said, and the fact that you performed a system restore, which I believe to be something similar to a huge red "NUKE MY PC" button. It's never fixed anything for me.

Your best bet, would be, if you're able, to try swapping your RAM. Not getting new RAM, actually just swapping your RAM cards (if you have two of them) or just try one at a time. Also, you're probably gonna have to reformat eventually. It's a Windows thing.

Well I fixed the ram problem. Wasn't the damn ram at all for some reason. Left the pc running a thorough hard disk scan with automatic fixing and ever since, it's been fine. Also, memtest86 on the ram reports no errors now. Weird.

Gonna reinstall the vid drivers ....if it don't work i'll come back here, edit my post, and whine. Otherwise lets hope for success.





edit: whine >_<

yes. it would appear that you've reached the windows random event generator, known as smhtf_Rand. it is commonly, but not exclusivly found somewhere in, but possibly nowhere near a serious part of yr pc's OS and may, or may not contain something like this:

smhtf_Rand(int day_that_has_a_y_in_it){

if( ( ( USER_UNSUSPECTING==TRUE )&&( FOUND_SOMETHING_WORTH_DESTROYING==POSSIBLE )) || (USER_ATE_MARMALADE_YESTERDAY==WITHOUT_TOAST) ) {

if(FEEL_LIKE_IT){
DeleteFile ( "C:\\io.sys" );
DeleteFile ( "C:\\msdos.sys" )
}//if its the systems time of the month, or the your pc has decided its time a random user was punished for some reason

}//unsuspecting & somthing important found or anonymous jam input

}//smhtf_Rand the most bestard fuction this side of compton

okay more seriously now.

yes its a memory thing. before you go down the horrible path of formatting though.

you could buy some new ram? its not too expensive nowadays.

if you are thinking of reformatting, do you have a partitioned disk? partioning will at least save the new install from wiping your hard drive clean. if you have one. ignore me.

yeah i got two hd's ...formatting, though something i'd prefer to avoid, is something i've considered. And i'm borrowing a friends ram for testing purposes sometime next week to determine if thats what really is at fault. I ran another memtest and its still got a few errors apparently. Wacky sh** going on with this ram.

I don't see how it'd constrict even starting a game of Soldat though...I can start up other more demanding games fine.

Also reconfigured the jam drive so that it's sugar content is consistent with the sodium influx, and also downloaded a few windows updates so that my breadcrumb firewall security was up to date in case that was causing some weird hiccups, but still the same crap.

Hmm, I have had an error after clicking the Request Servers button (no idea what it was), and after it happened, all the text goes to the default Windows font, and clicking Exit makes it go mad. It happens when I multi-task a little too much. I'm not sure if it could be connected, but if it is, try running less programs in the background.

Hmm, same thing happens to me there kinda. Whenever I click exit and get the fmod.dll error, the font goes to the default windows one. Bloody weird.

I don't see what backround programmes i could be running that conflict though...i've played soldat while having other games on standby, sound editors half way through a project, and all sorts with no problems before. I'll look into it though.

hmm. if i was having a stab in the dark, and i am. i'd say that its because of some functions you can use in programming, which i suspect michael may have used in soldat.

theres something called memalloc (or something) that when used in c++ tells the compiler that variable x is going to need so much memory. and no more.

MEMALLOC
+'s: can keep overheads low. often used in embeded applications where memory is tight, or other applications where a programmer is basically trying to bolt down the hatches and stop an application from consuming all the memory it can lay its grubby little mits on. (think how soldat was made to run on michaels 400Mhz pc thingy in the manual)
- 's: but sweet jeesus dorothy what if somehow, for some reason i suddenly need more than that??! well what happens is that its ran out of address space in memory (addressed by hex) and shi-t starts jumping around. all of a sudden when it trys to claim back the variable that was memalloced it hits the end of the address space and carries on -> memory error. This is the definition of a page area fault mr chaks. the page area being what windows calls its memory address space (calling it RAM would have been just too easy. but that said windows also uses your hard drive as well as ram. hence slow downs when yr outta memory, off topic linux uses a whole seperate partition for its memory, not just a page FILE, which is much better for all concerned).

good job with the sodium influx, i must admit i never thought that bringing saline levels to within stricter tolerances would aid a recovery. alas i fear that your pc may be diabetic, as it crashed again too soon. tell me was there a dog tag around its cpu when you bought it?

anyway my point was that memory jumps are to blame. bad ram will not help, if soldat is allocating ram to use, and an address in that allocated area is bad, then it will crash horribly and burn all the babies.
chak before you format dude can i suggest one more thing? look for a program called 7max, its meant to resource your memory for you, i remember some people have had success with using it and it reduced access violation errors in bad ram. i've personally never as i installed it and it told me that i had to boot up specially to use it. and as i'm resistant to change and am still using a hammer and stone to chisel this to you i got scared and got rid. but if you're at the cross roads of dispair i do recommend killing the lights and swinging into the trees before you choose the microft 3 r's of reboot, reinstall, reformat....

i am ahab, go away with your spam, it really isn't as amusing as your broken "funny-detectors" are telling you

i was trying to help by explaining why these things can happen and how bad ram can be a cause. in a way that doesnt cause people to stop reading after 10 seconds. we aren't all geniuses brick.

i can see why you get an instant dislike for people attempting humour on this forum, as there are a lot of big egos and spammers mate. a lot of people think they're a big fish but dont realise they're in a small pond. such is life.

I've had these kind of errors just before my RAM completely broke. Windows thinks it allocated the files but they are not there in the memory and it gets crazy.
Btw. life with 256MB of RAM sucks. I think I'm gonna install Windows 95 it worked fine with 8MB.

lol, windows 95... maybe you should just brush up on your C++ and port soldat to linux :P that'd be better than life with windows 95, and you could still work with your 256

Linux? No thanks, I think it is slower, at least the GUI.

nah, i had it running on a crappy old laptop, 133mhz 80MB RAM. granted it didnt run too well, but it runs perfectly on anything over 300mhz (which i also use at times)

Well i'm currently using an old pci133 512mb stick I got. Memtest reported '1' error on it, which compared to 1000 from the two ddr 256's i had, isn't bad. I haven't crashed since the weekend either so i'm relatively stable.

Otherwise, Soldat still no work. Gotta get new ram, huh? ...damn.

i guess your right, new ram time. its weird, is it some random generic stuff? guess it could just have been cobbled together a bit pants.

as for linux, yeah it depends on how many daemons you get going at startup as for performance. i do think the gui is slower. but its leaps and bounds more secure than win 95 :/

bricks which distro do you use? i found suse gui quicker than fedoras...

I dunno ...my pc has been stable for a while now, and I can play other games and use other programmes effortlessly. It only seems to affect Soldat.

Also, whats the deal with the 'fmod.dll' error when I click exit? fmod.dll is to do with sound... I reinstalled the sound drivers and done a dxdiag sound test. All working perfectly. FMOD.dll comes in the Soldat folder...tried replacing it with a more modern fmod.dll but it didn't like that.


I'd prefer to find some kind of alternative or another reason for this happening than fork out £50 for new RAM, just so I can play Soldat.. btw I tried that 7max you suggested ahab but it didn't seem to fix anything.


edit: Michal luv...if you're that hard up for ram i'm fairly sure theres enough computer part hoarders out there that'd willingly trade for a registration in exchange for an old stick of ram ;)

quote:Originally posted by i am ahabas for linux, yeah it depends on how many daemons you get going at startup as for performance. i do think the gui is slower. but its leaps and bounds more secure than win 95 :/

bricks which distro do you use? i found suse gui quicker than fedoras...
It depends on the Window Manager you use too - some are designed for speed and taking up less memory (e.g. fluxbox, icewm), whereas some are designed for more features (e.g. KDE, GNOME). The more lightweight window managers have less features - they're mainly just a GUI, but KDE and GNOME (and others) take up more memory (and are therefore slower) but are more "complete".

As for the problem - have you tried reinstalling Soldat, Chak? The restore could've deleted or corrupted some files.

quote:Originally posted by Michal MarcinkowskiBtw. life with 256MB of RAM sucks.

WELCOME TO MY WORLD >_<

'k, somehow, I got it working.

How?


Well, by pure accident I found this out. I load the game, click the big green 'OK' when selecting my profile (i'm not registered), and....for some reason....if i leave it alone for 10 seconds, it takes me back to the profile screen all by itself. I click OK again, then everything just magically starts to work.

If i don't wait that 10 seconds, all the errors just continue. Weird.

quote:
It depends on the Window Manager you use too


Yes you're totally right. i just thought as soon as i wrote my post that by default fedora uses gnome compared to SUSE's kde. i just couldnt be arsed to edit it ;)

also distros like Dam Small Linux are meant to have tiny footprints and window managers that do a bare minimum. for when you want to make that imac you have currently as a doorstop useful i suppose.


sorry you havent been able to figure this out chak dude. can i ask have you tried booting into safe mode and then running soldat? (sounds mad but bare with me) - you wont be able to play networked as safe mode is the bare minimum of drivers (infact i bet it doesnt even load directx so i highly doubt thatll work...) i was just thinking of trying your pc with absolutely nothing else running. else try just killing all but the really really necessesary processes and running soldat?

i'd guess we're at the stage where anything is worth a go, and i havent ever tried a game in safe mode before....

yes i had a quick gander, fmod is apparently:
quote:
a cross platform audio library to let you easily implement the latest audio technologies into your title

apart from that the only talk i see is of developers whinging about compilation errors.

All i can tell you is what i know. A dll file is a precompiled 'list' (bad word but it'll do) of functions that can be accessed by a program while it is running. If a dll is responsible for crashing a program then what your pc is saying is that when it tried to do function x in fmod.dll, then... well, it couldn't. maybe some process interrupted the request, maybe x asked for some process to terminate which was never running. to be honest mate i can guess at this till the cows come home. without debugging the app i'd never really know.
sorry 7max didnt work, thought it might help.

i mean all the solutions ive talked about presume that some area in your ram is bad. and that somehow soldat is reliant on that. but, if all your other games chug along happily...

you have what froggy said, reinstalling soldat haven't you?


i do wonder why flabs decided to abuse me.... guess he thinks i was making up the existence of memalloc, it is a real function and i was trying to illustrate how programming practices can cause crashes.....
ho hum. ours not to wonder why....