Help needed: strange crashing behavior
 

I am unable to crack the mystery of my ongoing constant CTD problem, largely rendering the campaign unplayable. I only seem to encounter this when playing the campaign, so I've done some investigation and I think I've narrored it down some: the error CTDs only seem to occuring during the use of time compression, or during realtime play, but only after having used time compression.

Here are some various scenarios:
1. submarine school missions: I can play these for a long period of time in a single mission, or play the missions over and over again for shorter times with no problems whatsoever. Just to see, I started cruising around the map in the "navigation" mission under TC. Game crashed within 10 minutes or so, with the TC running at 512x, I believe.

2. career mode: starting a career in manila at the start of the war, I will almost invariably have a CTD after playing for a bit. CTDs have occured during TC in the navigation map, in the navigation map in 1x time, and in the 3D world in 1x time.

3. career mode: to test the above further, after entering the sim with a start outside the harbor, I simply left the game in the control room 3D view at 1x time and walked away, not giving any orders or altering the game state in any way. Sim ran for over an hour with no crashes. I then changed to the navigation map and left it running in 1x time for half an hour or so without a crash, bringing me up to 1-2 hours without a crash. I then increased TC and let the game run, only opening the log for messages and stepping TC back up when necessary. Within 10 minutes I CTD'd with this error:
Errors tend to vary between modname sh4.exe, kernel.dll and "unknown," although there have been a few other .dlls there as well.

I have also had the game go to the blue screen of death followed by an instant computer reboot on 2 or 3 occasions. I really don't understand this behavior. I had some CTD issues before the patch, but it seems to have become much more frequent and much more specific to the circumstances described above since 1.2.

I applied the 1.2 patch to a clean install of the game. Errors occur with and without mods in effect.

When you did your clean install of the game before you installed the patch,
did you clean the registry files too. An uninstall of the game seems to leave
some of the registry files intact and not remove them. I had to do that by
hand....

JIM

Using time compression uses the CPU and memory a lot. So they heat up. When the heat is too much, the bios decides to reboot to let it cool.

So you need to keep your computer cooler: leave the case open and buy case-fans (one for the front to bring cool air in and one for the back of the case to remove the hot air over the CPU).

Also, define your clean install. Did you dump the SH4 folder found in MY DOCUMENTS folder? Also, I see you said you patched to 1.2. Was 1.1 also installed? Some have had issues just running with patch 1.2. If you have not installed 1.1 then 1.2, I then recommend a complete cleaning of the install you have now, delete that folder in MY DOC's. Delete any mods if you have any. Install vanilla, 1.1 then 1.2 right over that. Let us know if that helps with your issue!

Plus the old trick of reducing sound acceleration to 0 in Dxdiag.

JCC

Good point John. Also, in the game option screen under sound we have that 3D sound deal. I put it to max and my AA guns would crackle. I reduced it and my AA now sound like AA.