Permanent problems with ET on every system

(Deathwing00) #1

I have played ET on AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with 512 RAM, a GForce4MX and SBLive!5.1 both under windows and linux. I also have played it with a GForce2MX.
I have played it on a different system too, P-IV, 512 RAM and so…

I always have the same problem, me and all my mates: The game randomly crashes/exits to desktop, sometimes with a message “MEMORY CANNOT BE READ” and so (that under winxp with visual studio 6). I have sent many mails to ask for the correction of this problem but got no reply and I think I’m going to make anti-propaganda to the game, for the simple reason that the game has a great BUG in it and no one moves to correct it.

So please, if anyone knows how to solve this, just say… I’m tired of trying to get support and receive no reply. :disgust:

(Wils) #2

Who are you mailing for support?

(BondyBoy007) #3

I have played it on three different set-ups with no problem these systems were:
XP2000+, 512DDR RAM, GeForce4MX & SBLive 5.1 - No Problem
Duron 750, 512 PC133 RAM, GForce2 & SBLive 5.1 - no problem
XP2400+, 512DDR RAM, Geforce3Ti & SBLive 5.1 - no problem
All running WinXP Professional

Are all these problems your having from the same install disk/EXE?

Have you posted on any forums regarding this problem before or just have you just emailed?and where did you email?

(Kendle) #4

So you’re going to make anti-ET propoganda just because you can’t play it? Even though everyone else can? Hmmm.

As for getting no support, well yes, that does suck. I think you should take it back to the shop you got it from and ask for your money back…oh no, wait, it didn’t cost you anything!

([=O=]SMYLER) #5

Who put together these machines for “me and all my mates” ?

(grudgebearer) #6

I seriously doubt that your “anti-propoganda” is going to effect splashdamage…since the game is FREE they don’t really stand to lose anything if no one plays it. But, since 99% of the rest of the people(myself included) playing the game apparently do not experience this problem; something tells me your “anti-propoganda” will go unnoticed.

But, by all means be a tard if you want, and post anti-propoganda here, I love to spectate good flame wars.

(Belisarius) #7

Because you have a problem (be it on two different rigs), you gotta have a lot more on your case before you can even consider whipping out the B-word. :disgust: I have no idea what may cause the error…all drivers (mobo, graphics, sound) are latest version from the manufacturer, I assume? What kind of memory?

I’d start checking out the sound card. Those are the often the source of the most mysterious crashes… does it crash if you have another card in?

(BlackDeath) #8

Its not a bug, but something that is wrong/is not campatable with your computer. There are a lot of other players with similar specs that dont have a problem.

As for creating propoganda against ET/SD, good luck! Ill help save you some time…

It aint gonna work :drink:

B_D

(Deathwing00) #9

You are not listening to me. This happens to me and more people with different systems, some of them are in other countries and so. About the anti-propaganda, efforthless, unnecessary,… I’m not the only one that has the problem so what about this?

About that this is a free game: there is a european law article that makes it compulsory for every soft that arrives to european hands to have support or else be considered abandonware or something like that. Anyway and to hell with laws.

I have notticed that, in difference with other people that have this problem, I only have it when the computer is long time up. It’s very strange indeed! Yeah, probably you would say a ‘thermal’ problem but no! Temperatures are below 50ºC both on CPU and Graphics card.

Just a remark: Under LINUX it hangs further less!

And one more thing: take your uncivilized behaviour elsewhere. I don’t like talking to barbarians so better moderate yourselves children.

(Deathwing00) #10

I was emailing idsoftware, but they do not give support for what I’ve seen. A Gamespy admin told me to post a message here so maybe someone would have a solution to my problem. Perhaps it’s a game setting that is missconfigured by default or something like that…

(puds) #11

OK lets be a bit more constructive about getting this fixed…

  • how soon does ET crash - right away or after a few minutes

  • can you get as far as playing a game or does it crash during installation?

  • try patching punkbuster manually by downloading pbweb.exe from here http://www.evenbalance.com/downloads/pbweb.exe and putting it into your PB folder and running.

  • try a reinstallation after deleting ET completely

  • just guessing on this one, but what country/locale are you running in Windows - could there be a bizarre problem - try US/UK Settings?

  • have you installed the latest video drivers?

(Ozzie) #12

Just a thought, have you swapped out the memory/ run tests on the memory? I have found that as the price of memory has come down, so has the quality. This might explain why you and your m8s are see the same problem as you might have found a ‘great’ price and passed on the info to them. I had one xp where I bought 30 sticks, 20 of them were bad and had to be returned. When I received the replacements, of those 20, 11 were bad, the replacements for the 11, 3 were bad. They were 256meg sticks and were about $25(US), you get what you pay for.

I have also heard some MB’s bios having problems with PCI sound/AGP Vid combinations. Once you have run tests on the memory and confirmed that there are no ‘holes’ in it, make sure your drivers are up-to-date. Next make sure your bios is the latest-and-greatest, if not flash it.

Another thing you might look into is the HD. Again as the price has decreased/size increased, the quality IMHO has gone to hell.

(Hewster) #13

I suggest you post, in detail, all the system specs you have problems
with… It is ni-on impossible to fault find a problem with the amount
of info you have put forward so far
eg my system specs are:

Althlon XP 2500+ clocked to 2Ghz
512Mb 266 DDR Crucial ram
Asus A7V8X-X mobo bios version 1003
using on-board SoundMAX audio (driver ver. 5.12.1.3538)
Asus V7700 grahics card (GF2 Ultra 64Mb) using Asus 44.03 drivers
using on-board LAN (VIA Rhine II 10/100 Mbps) driver 3.15.0.351
Internet connection is BT broadband 512/256
MS Intelimouse explorer, driver 4.0.657
MS InternetPro keyboard, using 101/102-key drivers(5.0.2195.6717)
Windows 2000 SP4 + all crucial updates from windows update web-site

For the record I have 0 problems as you describe with my installation of ET
& I suggest if you really want help, you try being a bit more polite, as
with your apparent attitude I would not be surprised if you just get
flamed !

Hewster

btw, sounds like a RAM issue… have you tried testing your ram ?
http://www.memtest86.com/

(Deathwing00) #14

All right, about drivers and so, I got the latest and blah blah… I told you I also run it under linux using the latest nVidia drivers. About the game I can say sometimes I can be playing for 3 hours and no crashes happen, while other times it crashes after 10 minutes or so.
That memory explanation seems to be stright to the point but… I use DDR333 memory which is not so cheap (and I bought it one year ago, that cost me about 60€ each module of 256MB (made in germany).

My system:

Althlon XP 1800+ clocked to 1,57Ghz
512Mb 333 DDR (motherboard supports 400)
Gigabyte GA-7VA K7 Triton 400 motherboard (VIA KT400 chipset) AWARD BIOS ver: F8
SBLive! 5.1 (5 speakers + woofer)
nVidia GForce4MX440 (Also tried with GForce2MX)
Using standard ethernet RTL-8139too driver for broadband 300/150 connection

OS:

  • Gentoo GNU/Linux 2.4.20 xfs-sources-r3 (latest nvidia kernel patch applied)

  • Windows XP SP1 with all updates

Now I’ll proceed to test my RAM, just in case.

PBpatches: useless, seems a ET specific problem. I play RtCW normally on all my systems: no problem.

(Ozzie) #15

I saw that and that is why I asked/explained about memory first.

Again this can be explained by bad memory, RAM (Random Access Memory) means that you will hit the ‘hole’ randomlly. Also, if you were doing something in excel/powerpoint (or openoffice/Gnumeric on linux) and closed the applications, then started ET, you might hit the hole sooner, although the memory management in linux is much better the windows and should not be an issue.

Is this XP home or professional? Can make a big difference, If I HAVE to run windows on a machine, it has to be PRO, my xp with XP home was that I could not load most of my kids games, when MS sent me a free copy of PRO (trying to change the mind of a Linux bigot, yea right) all the games loaded and ran fine.

Let us know the results of the mem test…

(Belisarius) #16

Memory sticks are the weirdest things out there. My friend bought two 256 DDR sticks (@266 MHz), and they simply would not work. So I borrowed them, plugged them to my board and lo and behold. They worked on my rig and has ever since, with no problems whatsoever.

(Deathwing00) #17

I saw that and that is why I asked/explained about memory first.

Again this can be explained by bad memory, RAM (Random Access Memory) means that you will hit the ‘hole’ randomlly. Also, if you were doing something in excel/powerpoint (or openoffice/Gnumeric on linux) and closed the applications, then started ET, you might hit the hole sooner, although the memory management in linux is much better the windows and should not be an issue.

Is this XP home or professional? Can make a big difference, If I HAVE to run windows on a machine, it has to be PRO, my xp with XP home was that I could not load most of my kids games, when MS sent me a free copy of PRO (trying to change the mind of a Linux bigot, yea right) all the games loaded and ran fine.

Let us know the results of the mem test…[/quote]

It is not a memory problem. All tests PASSED. I use winXP Pro :wink:

About linux, I tell you all my system is compiled for it in it. That means that everything that runs in my linux box, starting from the kernel and ending to applications has been compiled in my machine for its own code. If there were truly hardware problems, compilation had failed as it takes more resources on the system than running a simple game. What is more, other games with higher requirements than ET work perfectly. ET is the only one that brings me such strange problem. Concluding, no HW problem, no OS problem, no config problem: ET problem. :banghead:

(SCDS_reyalP) #18

If it was an ET problem, the rest of us would have it. But we don’t. Many people play it for many hours on end without crashing. If ET is actually incompatible with you system, it is still most likely a system problem of somekind, because it works fine on most systems.

Just because the crash shows up only under ET does not mean that it is an ET problem. While compiling is CPU intensive, it is not exactly the same load as as ET. For example, if your problem was in power supply or voltage regulation, that might show up only in games. In any case I’ve seen plenty of faulty systems which crashed only in one or two seemingly random applications.

PBpatches: useless, seems a ET specific problem. I play RtCW normally on all my systems: no problem.

Could still be a pb problem with ET. Each game uses it’s own pb version.

(Ozzie) #19

Sorry about the big quote but…

I have to agree, I have run ET for many hours, just ask my wife. I have run it on winXP-PRO and linux boxen (Mandrake(1) and debian(10)) with no problems. Compiling is a different animal then gaming, no use of the VPU in compiling. 3D gaming is one of the most taxing applications on your system. Compling is very cpu intense, but only cpu intense, on the other hand, 3D gaming uses most of your hardware at the same time, networking,graphics, memory,HD, etc…

I was not sure about PB, so I did not talk to it, but if each game uses it’s own version, it’s worth a try. Problem Determination is a long laboris process, that why those of us that do it get paid the big bucs :smiley: Please try updating PB and let us know the result…

(Deathwing00) #20

Look. No I’ve been playing 2 hours ET under Linux without a crash with a new kernel and have been compiling in background! That means to have plenty hardware under heavy work and no crash happened.
I’m suspecting that the problem is WinXPpro or an application that is running in background that makes game crash like Norton Antivirus Corporate, CloneCD, MemChecker or something like that. Perhaps it’s not an ET problem but it is indeed a SOFT problem… for what I’ve seen, ET works cool under my new linux kernel so I can say only one thing: WINDOWS is a SHIT.

Also about the distros you use… please, take mandrake away… that looks too much like windows and sucks indeed. About Debian, the testing/unstable one rocks, but the stable one sucks. Better you try Gentoo and see what your computer is capable! :slight_smile:

Anyway, thanks for your attention mates. (And sorry, I can’t ask your wife nor believe nor not believe you have one, cos I don’t know you)

And I think that’s all. Have fun playing ET as I am having, under Linux, of course, as windows sucks.

Also, for what I’ve seen, in my Pentium system, with exactly the same winXP config and apps, happened the same. (You didn’t say anything about that)