First post, by VirtuaIceMan
- Rank
- Oldbie
I've posted on here a few times about games which seem to crash for me, but they work for other people running Win8.1 64bit or Win7 64bit with different lesser Geforce cards (for example). I tried some of the games on my work PC (running Win7 64bit with ATI Radeon HD 4600 and they worked fine!).
Very rarely the games work for a brief while, then crash back to the desktop. The Event Viewer usually says they've crashed ntdll.dll (most often) or DINPUT.dll (or, rarer, KERNELBASE.dll), all of these dlls being in the SYSTEM32 folder.
I decided that as so many games are affected I'd heavily debug this, to see if I could find a cause (and therefore fix them all in one go!). I'll run through the hilariously long list of things I've tried in a moment, but first of all, here's a list of (some) of the games affected (I believe these are all affected by the same issue, but one or two might have a different issue). I've linked each to the original thread I posted about the games, if I posted a thread on here.
Note: NFS Hot Pursuit 2 is my main game I test; a few times I got into the intro video then the main menu, but the game froze some time after (when loading a race, for example), but usually it crashes just after resizing the screen, before the intro video plays. I also tried the NFSHP2 demo and tried a no-CD exe for the game. Supercar Street Challenge also behaves the same (though I get to see the opening videos and loading bar before it crashes back to desktop...
NOTE: demos are available on page 3 of this thread...
Breakneck (NICE2) - fixed, see page 5
Carmageddon TDR2000 - fixed, see page 5
Extreme Sprint 3010 - crashes randomly; not down to the issue that caused other crashes
F1 2000 & F1 Championship Season 2000 - fixed, using dgVoodoo 2.45 with latest WIP version (run fullscreen)
F1 Racing Championship & Racing Simulation 3 - fixed
F1 World Grand Prix & WARM UP! - fixed, see page 5
Grand Touring - fixed, needed Win95 mode applying!
Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing - fixed, see page 5, I had to rename the .exe to get audio in-game too, due to some sort of compatibility setting Windows imposed
Rally Masters - fixed, see page 5
Need For Speed Porsche 2000 - fixed, see page 5
Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2 - fixed, see page 5
Sega Rally 2 - fixed, see page 5, though it's quite crash happy (especially with _inmm.dll applied for music playback)
South Park Rally - fixed, see page 5
Superbike 2001 - more issues with this one
Supercar Street Challenge - fixed, see page 5
So what have I tried to get these to work? Deep breath... after each change the crashes still happened...
- 1. Tried installing older DirectX versions - but DirectX tells me that I have newer installed.
2. Tried reducing sound quality down to CD quality (as I heard needs to b 48khz or lower to stop some crashes).
3. Tried disabling sound cards (both onboard integrated and Soundblaster ZXr) = proves it's not sound hardware related.
4. Tried disabling GTX 980, unplugged its cables and ran from Intel 4600 HD integrated graphics = proves it's not graphics card/Geforce driver related.
5. Tried a Clean Boot = proves it's not something running in the background related.
6. Tried limiting number of processors to 1 and maximum memory to 4GB in msconfig/Boot/Advanced options = proves it's not CPU/high memory related.
7. Tried removing one 8GB RAM stick and tried each of my two RAM sticks independently = proves it's not RAM related.
8. Tried a fresh install of Win8.1 64bit on a spare hard drive, with nothing except latest Geforce drivers = proves it's not something I've installed related.
9. Tried a fresh install of Win7 64bit on a spare hard drive, with nothing added except latest Geforce drivers = proves it's not Win8.1 related.
So I'm pretty much out of ideas now!
Could it be some part of my motherboard causing the crash? Or the processor? Or something in the UEFI BIOS? When I was fiddling I tried letting it auto-setup the BIOS for a gain in speed, but it kept making the PC restart several times on boot up, which confused my graphics card into showing nothing, so I had to reset the BIOS using the jumpers on the motherboard, so you can assume the BIOS is probably pretty much default settings now.
My final fix for this would be to run a VMWare Player virtual WinXP machine, but that feels like cheating, when other people get many of these games running fine on Win8.1 64bit.
If anyone wants me to post anything from Event Viewer, or run any more tests, or run any other programs to check anything, just ask. Over to you guys for ideas...!
My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor