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Shadows over Riva gets slower and slower, then crashes.

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First post, by Haddas

Posted on 
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The title explains it all really. I am desperately in need of help with this one. I can play for 20 minutes tops, before it starts lagging. then the lag gets worse and worse over the course of several minutes, and then I can't do anything anymore. Alt+tab does nothing but let me choose to jump to another program, which does not happen, but the screen goes black. The game music still plays. I use:
1. GigaByte GA-7VASFS motherboard
2. AMD Athlon XP +2400 2,00GHz
3. 1024mb of DDR-Ram of the speed 333MHz
4. ATi Radeon 9600 128mb (Sapphire)
5. Realtek '97 (onboard soundcard)
6. Windows XP (SP2)
7. Realms of Arkania - Shadows over Riva. (First, unpatched version. Doubt there are any patches. Requires CD to run)
8. To summarize: Gameplay good with some frameskipping and upping CPU usage, but gets laggier and laggier until I must hard-reboot
9. Every time I play it
10. Sound Blaster 16. 220, 7, 1, 5. mode: auto, rate 22050. mixer in use. Block size 2048 and prebuffer 10.
11. Fullscreen, 640x480, OpenGL, scaling normal2x and hardware scaling 1,00
12. Dosbox 0.63
13. I'm stumped. I have read the manual and the FAQs, but they cannot answer these questions. I have already tried searching the forums. Maybe this hasn't been answered, maybe I couldn't find it.

Help would be greatly appreciated. I think I supplied enough information... or did I?

In Sovjet Russia, the Television watches YOU!

Reply 1 of 3, by MiniMax

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Normally(?) such behaviour is due to bad memory handling by the application or the OS (which in this case is DOSBox). And it is very hard to track down without tools to examine where all memory have gone.

If you are lucky it is problem DOSBox, because that means that the problem will eventually be fixed 😀

I would try 2 things:

1) Download/install one of the experiemental versions of DOSBox:
http://cvscompile.aep-emu.de/dosbox.htm

2) If that does not help, see if the problem is with a DOS-extender built into the game. Many games uses an extender called DOS4GW (it will usually say so during startup). If you can find a newer one from a different game, you should be able to use that instead. Or - go here (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?page=dos32a) and try a new extender called DOS32A.

DOSBox 60 seconds guide | How to ask questions
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Reply 2 of 3, by Haddas

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Thaaank YOU. This is exactly the stuff I've been looking for. Those links you gave me have been of much help, as have you for supplying them. I'm grateful for this.

In Sovjet Russia, the Television watches YOU!

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