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Judean Prince
08-12-2003, 16:12
I have MTW and every time I enter the game it crashes, usually it crashes right after a turn in the campaign, but sometimes it also crashes in the menus. when it crashes, it freezes up for a few seconds, and only then it crashes back to desktop.

here are my specs:

P4 2.53 Mhz
video card, Inno3D GeForce 4 MX 440
256 RAM
Windows 98 Second Edition in Hebrew

here is my crash file:

MEDIEVAL_TW.EXE caused an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION in module KERNEL32.DLL at 0187:BFF7A388, GetDateFormatA()+9241 byte(s)
EAX=01010101 EBX=00038404 ECX=01010101 EDX=E40766C0 ESI=04AC1A18
EDI=00FD7CFC EBP=010AC6F8 ESP=010AC6D4 EIP=BFF7A388 FLG=00010216
CS=0187 DS=018F SS=018F ES=018F FS=574F GS=0000
0187:BFF7A388 (0x01E00000 0x04AC1A18 0x00038404 0x00000000) KERNEL32.DLL, GetDateFormatA()+9241 byte(s)
0187:BFF7A550 (0x01E00000 0x00038404 0x00000000 0x010AC770) KERNEL32.DLL, GetDateFormatA()+9697 byte(s)
0187:BFF88DC9 (0x01E00000 0x00000000 0x00038400 0x00000001) KERNEL32.DLL, HeapCreate()+0466 byte(s)
0187:0072C697 (0x00038400 0x00728B8B 0x00038400 0x00000001) MEDIEVAL_TW.EXE
0187:0072C58E (0x0009D900 0x65000080 0x54007004 0xE8F000FF) MEDIEVAL_TW.EXE

I would appreciate any help, thanks. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/confused.gif

Lord Of Storms
08-12-2003, 16:16
Greetings Judean PrinceWelcome to the ORG, I am going to copy your post over to The Apothecary, with such a detailed eror report I am sure our resident expert Kraellin will figure out your problem . LOS

Judean Prince
08-12-2003, 16:30
Thanks http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

Divine Wind
08-12-2003, 17:25
Try these links and see if anything works.

http://support.microsoft.com/support....ern.asp (http://support.microsoft.com/support/windows/topics/errormsg/kbkern.asp)

http://www.aumha.org/a/k32fix.htm

http://www.generation.net/~hleboeuf/errkrn32.htm

http://www.all-windows.com/kernel32.html

Good luck

Kraellin
08-13-2003, 04:40
system crashes and crashes to desktop are caused by two basic things, lack of resources and a mismatched system configuration to the software being run. i suspect the latter is your case.

i'll try and keep this short. basically what the latter condition amounts to is a round peg in a square hole situation. your hardware has to talk to itself, all the various pieces and these have to be able to do so rather smoothly. and, your system has to talk to the software you're running, in this case, mtw.... and it aint. or at least not very well.

that's where drivers come in. drivers can help align your hardware to your other hardware and your overall system to the software you're running. that you can get into the menus and even start a campaign, says you've almost got it... but not quite.

i wont bother you with any further technical explanation of that error message, but basically you have to correct it with drivers. one or more of your devices arent quite matched up with other devices or the software. most probably this is the vid card, but could be the sound card as well.

now, going back to the original paragraph in here, it could also be a resource management problem. to fix this, turn EVERYTHING non-essential OFF in your system before running the game. that means everything in the background except explorer and systray. turn off hardware sound acceleration in dxdiag. turn off anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering in desktop, settings, advanced. turn your agp aperture down one notch in bios. cut your pci texture memory down to 5 megs in desktop, settings, advanced (if that feature is available). doing these things frees up system resources and can eliminate the need for a driver update in some cases, as you're not demanding that those features be run, so the drivers dont care about them and thus avoids any mismatches.

hardware -> drivers -> software...that's the key.

also, run dxdiag just for the heck of it and make sure all the tests prove good.

K.

Judean Prince
08-13-2003, 11:57
Thanks, I did what you told me and then played the game, when I got to the part where the game usually crashes(Holding concil at the end of a turn) it didnt crash for a change, BUT when I tried to marry a pincess to a prince it crashed again, I checked the crash file and this is what it said:

MEDIEVAL_TW.EXE caused an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION in module MEDIEVAL_TW.EXE at 0187:00402A8E
EAX=0000B494 EBX=000000B0 ECX=00000003 EDX=00000070 ESI=06D20018
EDI=00000001 EBP=00000004 ESP=010AB554 EIP=00402A8E FLG=00210202
CS=0187 DS=018F SS=018F ES=018F FS=570F GS=0000
0187:00402A8E (0x00700465 0x00700465 0xF000FF54 0xF0007DE8) MEDIEVAL_TW.EXE

Kraellin
08-13-2003, 15:24
ok, that's progress.

what vid card drivers are you using and what version of directx do you have?

have you run dxdiag and if so, how did it test?

what sound card do you have?

are you running the Inno3D GeForce 4 MX 440 drivers, or did you get the nvidia drivers?

do you have any service packs for win98se installed?

what's your current setting on agp aperture in bios now?

try turning down hardware graphics acceleration 1 notch and try the game again.

K.

Judean Prince
08-13-2003, 15:56
Quote[/b] ]
what vid card drivers are you using and what version of directx do you have?
I'm looking at the Direct X diagnostic tool, and it says my main driver is nvdisp.drv version 4.13.0001.2890, I have DirectX 9.0.

Quote[/b] ]have you run dxdiag and if so, how did it test?

Yes, I've done all the tests in the dxdiag, both sound and video and everything is ok.

Quote[/b] ]what sound card do you have?
I think I have VIA AC'97 Enhanced Audio controller(WDM), that's what it says in the control panel\system.

Quote[/b] ]are you running the Inno3D GeForce 4 MX 440 drivers, or did you get the nvidia drivers?
As I mentioned before I have nvdisp.drv so I think its Nvidia.

Quote[/b] ]do you have any service packs for win98se installed?
I dont know what is a windows 98 service pack so I dont know if I got one.

Quote[/b] ]what's your current setting on agp aperture in bios now?
I'm not quite sure what you mean, but in dxdiag it says AGP texture acceleration enabled.

Quote[/b] ]try turning down hardware graphics acceleration 1 notch and try the game again.
I'm already on one less then the top, I tried earlier to get even less but the game wouldnt load with an error about Direct3d something.

Kraellin
08-13-2003, 23:49
ok, this:
Quote[/b] ]I'm looking at the Direct X diagnostic tool, and it says my main driver is nvdisp.drv version 4.13.0001.2890 is most likely the problem. they are nvidia drivers, but they are somewhat old. normally, that shldnt matter a great deal with win98, but you're also using directx 9, whichi is fairly new. try some new vid card drivers. i'm not sure what the latest version is right now, but the nvidia site shld be able to provide them to you.

the ac97 sound thing has had some problems in the past, but let's update your vid drivers before messing with this.

a 'service pack' for windows is like a major patch or update for any given version of windows. if you dont have it, dont worry about it for now. again, let's do the vid drivers first.

the agp aperture is a thing that resides in bios. bios stands for basic input output system, and is sort of the heart of your configuration of your machine. it's the thing that initially finds and organizes your hardware and some system settings for your motherboard. it's a very basic part of your machine and is not accessed through windows. again, we'll not worry about that for now.

the agp aperture resides in bios and controls how much memory is allocated to texture handling. and, yet again, we wont worry about that for now.

ok, if your hardware graphics acceleration is already turned down one notch, leave it there for now. if the vid drivers fix things, then you can turn this back up that one notch and check things again.

so, go to the nvidia site, get your new vid drivers and install them. check the game and let us know what ya got.

K.

Portuguese Rebel
08-14-2003, 01:21
Quote[/b] ]he ac97 sound thing has had some problems in the past, but let's update your vid drivers before messing with this.



Yes it did but not with MTW in my experience. I would go for the video card. DX9 and old drivers doesn't sound too good...

Judean Prince
08-14-2003, 07:52
http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mad.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mad.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mad.gif I updated the drivers and now NOTHING works..... when I try medieval it just opens up a black screen, when I try Americas Army for instance I can get into the game, but when I try to load up any missions it gives me the blue windows error screen saying I have a error in VXD or something, what can I do now???? http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mecry.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mecry.gif http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mecry.gif

Judean Prince
08-14-2003, 11:05
Ok, I uninstalled my new drivers and installed a somewhat older version that was still higher than my original drivers, now I can get the game to run but I still get a kernel32.dll fault in the campaign.

Kraellin
08-14-2003, 20:21
ok, a couple questions here. what version of driver did you try and what have you got in there now? also, is it just mtw that's giving you this crash or is just about everything crashing when you run it?

if it's just mtw that's crashing, just keep trying different drivers. try the 30.82's and the 41.09's. btw, this: 4.13.0001.2890 is the 28.90's. we generally use the last 4 numbers to identify the driver set for easier reference.

when you install new drivers, go into windows safe mode, uninstall the current drivers and install the standard vga drivers. reboot and then load in the new nvidia drivers. this makes sure you're not leaving old stuff in the driver set that can interfere with the new driver set.

just keep trying drivers till you find one that works for your system. it may take several tries cause you're using an older operating system with new directx and newer software and you've got to match all this stuff up right. the older the system, the trickier this can get, so dont be too discouraged if you have to try many different ones.

K.

Judean Prince
08-14-2003, 20:44
Ok, I tried 44.03 and nothing worked, MTW would go black screen in the beginning, so I went to another forum and some guy said that it happened to him with the same driver version and he installed 30.82, so thats what I did and now everything works like before, unfortunetly, the crash message is just like before, it doesnt happen to me in any other game, just MTW, I think I would be able to solve this if I turn everything that is non-essential off, the thing is, with this windows 98SE, when I try to close something with ctrl-alt-delete it just says closing... and is stuck.

Portuguese Rebel
08-15-2003, 00:17
Quote[/b] ] the thing is, with this windows 98SE, when I try to close something with ctrl-alt-delete it just says closing... and is stuck.

http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/confused.gif

This ain't very good. There seems to be something wrong with the Operative system, wich could explain the CTDs you have. Have you been trying other programs that require DX? Do you have an anti-virus running? If so, is the anti-virus updated? I'm asking this cause not being able to close stuff after ctrl+alt+del is suspicious and i remember some information on a worm that had such effect...

Kraellin
08-15-2003, 03:59
yup. i agree with rebel. con-alt-del shld be able to turn just about anything off. a virus is highly suspected here. wasnt it the system32.exe worm that did this? or maybe you've got a mutation of the new blast worm. i'd run a virus sweep with updated virus definitions.

i'd also check for overheating of the cpu. if the cpu is overheating you can get some oddball things going on also. if you're overclocking your system, set it back to normal. check your fans in your case and if you have a heat monitor in bios, check it.

k. no sense fiddling with vid drivers till you resolve this other thing. now, it is true that sometimes con-alt-del can hang in win98, but that's usually because you've just shut soemthing down or you've got some conflict with other software running and not just as a normal thing.

check those other things i mentioned first, and then try this: when you first boot up, and everything is loaded that's supposed to load and the harddrive has quit blinking, hit con-alt-del once to bring up the task manager. pick anything in the list except explorer or systray and see if you can end task on it. give it a few seconds and see if it hangs or freezes or gives you an error message. if it does, note the error message exactly and report back here.

K.

Judean Prince
08-15-2003, 12:04
I'm sure that I don't have a virus because I just did a sweep a couple days ago and the problem was before that, but I did reboot and then tried to close the programs right away, and it worked, I could close all the programs except for Systray and Explorer, the sad part is that MTW still crashes...

Kraellin
08-15-2003, 20:51
ok, that you can turn things off in the task manager is good.

now, while i still suspect this is a match-up problem between vid card, directx and hardware, let's hold on that for the moment.

find updated drivers for the ac 97 stuff.

make sure anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering are off.

turn off hardware sound acceleration in dxdiag. completely to the left...off.

go into the options menu in mtw and turn off smoke and fauna and make sure you're not using huge army sizes.

make sure your desktop resolution is 800 x 600 or larger and run the game in 800 x 600.

install directx 9.0b

re-install vid drivers right over the top of the existing ones if dx 9.0b didnt fix it.

reinstall the game right over the top of itself. dont uninstall it, just install right over the current install.

with each of those steps you may want to reboot again and then check the game again.

if none of this works, go back to trying different vid drivers and dont be afraid to go way back to versions with a lower number than what you originally started out with.

if none of that works, send me your computer along with the cd and a check for $10,000 ;)

btw, is that gf4 an agp or pci type card and what motherboard are you using?

also, if you can take a screenshot of your irq info, i'd be interested in looking at it. accessories, system tools, system info for the irq list. print screen.

K.

Knight_Ni!
08-20-2003, 09:21
The best solution is to install Windows XP, Win98 is very unstable, no matter what you do you may still not be able to play. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/wave.gif