That is not cool, eh? Can you tell us about your computer? What kind of cpu, operating system, how much RAM, etc.? Then, tell us about your SH4 game, such as: is it a disk version or a download, and where did you get it from? Do you happen to know which version it is? The most common versions are v1.3 and v1.5. Next, where do you have the game installed (drive and folder), and are you using any mods?
The way to find which version you have of the game is to go into the game folder and find the SH4.exe file. Right-click on it and choose "Properties" from the resultant 'context' menu. On the properties window that opens, left-click on the "Details" tab, and just about the middle of that window is "Product version..." On my copy, they use commas to separate the values, so v1.5 looks like "Product version: 1,5,0,0" from a Gold Edition disk install.
As to what happened for the CTD, it might be that you were using a very high compression, and you happened upon a large convoy, or a bunch of airplanes, and the computer couldn't handle things happening that fast in this old game. It could also be that, especially with airplanes, things happened so fast that your boat was sunk and you died before it came out of time compression. This is one of several bad things with time compression in the game. At one time, I had down a rough guess-timate as to how far a submarine travels at 10 knots when you're traveling at 8192x TC. It's like 6 minutes to travel a nautical mile at 1x... ?? (whatever you do, do NOT rely on my math...
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I'm sorry you lost such a good patrol. One way to attempt to avoid such in the future is to Save as you make contact with something, and save after the engagement - but make separate Saves for them. As you leave port on patrol, the game makes an auto-save. You want to make your own separate Saves, such as "Engagement_01_0815_surface" and then later "PostEngagement_01_1312_PD" or whatever scheme you want to use. That way, if the game crashes, you might be able to Load the saved game, and continue from where you were...
