I have the old game Martian Gothic for some time; it always seemed to have something against my newer computer. It runs OK on my mother's old Celeron 300MHz (except for random game freezes every hour or so - "thanks" to motherboard issues on that computer - and movie-only choppyness).

When I tried to run it on my new computer back when I still had Win98SE, it crashed to desktop on game start with no error message, and the error/startup log of the game (ERROR.LOG) showed something related to DirectX.

Now, on Windows XP (with all windows updates, SP2, and so on), it crashes to desktop with an error message (the one with no reason but with "send" and "don't send" buttons). It implicated Martian Gothic.exe as the crashed program.

The last two lines in the current ERROR.LOG file are:

Trying to create backdrop in video memory
Backdrop is in video mem

Tried to run it on various compatability modes. Didn't help. Tried to turn off sound acceleration. Didn't help either. Ran at a fresh restart. Didn't help either.

Computer specs:
Martian Gothic PC version, Patch 3 (latest patch) applied
Windows XP, fully updated, Service Pack 2 and so on
DirectX 9.0c
Intel Pentium-4 2.8MHz
256MB DDR RAM
GeForce FX 5200 (128MB RAM) Graphics Card with the latest drivers
Aureal Audio sound card with updated drivers

Solutions already attempted and failed:
- Reducing audio acceleration/audio sample quality in various combinations
- Reducing or cancelling video acceleration
- All available compatability modes (Win95, Win98, WinNT 4.0, Win2000) as well as all other shortcut compatability tab options (text services and so on)
- Running on a fresh Windows startup
- Changing speaker settings

Here's the FileMon log - quite long, but from what I've seen I think (based on my VERY limited computer knowledge) that this might have something to do with either a "buffer overflow" regarding the game's shortcut (?) or incompatibility with DLLs in the Windows\System32 directory. If you don't know FileMon, it could be downloaded from http://www.sysinternals.com/ .

I've searched the net for reports of the same problem and to no avail, the only thing I could find is that Martian Gothic is supposed to work well with Windows XP, so the problem is probably not the OS itself but something welse, but who knows...