2 replies to this topic

[gulyas]

So yesterday I took a copy of my mod to my cousin's place who wasn't able to get my mod working since sometime earlier this year, namely it always froze 2/3 of the way on the loading bar. Anyway, I tried the XWIS downloadable copy figuring maybe something was wrong with his old copy, and it too crashed.

Last night mulling over possible reasons, I concluded if it's not the mod, or his RA2, then it is likely something in his registry, and I emailed him what I located in my registry by email ahead of my arrival. Today I went there again, but this time I took a known good retail copy with update and no-cd patch, with my mod already installed in it, the whole thing to be sure it wasn't the files... and it crashed again.

Having sent the westwood key branches under software and the wow64 node sections, we did some comparing, nothing unusual, but for simplicity I relocated my RA2 copy to the same dir I use c:\cc-ra2... still crash.

Then going through the registry again, deleted all the Windows "ra2" related entries, including the mui and compatibility tables. I gave it a quick run test after that, and it died with the FATAL string error. Knowing the solution to that, I ran it as administrator, it loaded, then crashed entering the game like usual. Then doing the right-click compatibility menu, I set the ra2.exe to win98 and administrator...  voila! game worked!

.....

Now the curious bit is that the vanilla game worked fine in each case where my mod would freeze/crash... as far as I can tell you, this only started happening earlier this year (around april would be my guess), prior to that my mod didn't apparently need to be forced into win98 compatible mode.

Anyone have any ideas what could be in my mod that would fundamentally alter the compatibility of RA2 ???

[Sustanon]

Then doing the right-click compatibility menu, I set the ra2.exe to win98 and administrator...  voila! game worked!

Hey honey, thanks for sharing. I'm sure this can help many gamers out there wanting to play RA2! It makes sense, though, as RA2 was released in 2000 before Windows XP came out. So it was probably developed for Windows 98 in mind.
 

Now the curious bit is that the vanilla game worked fine in each case where my mod would freeze/crash... as far as I can tell you, this only started happening earlier this year (around april would be my guess), prior to that my mod didn't apparently need to be forced into win98 compatible mode.

Anyone have any ideas what could be in my mod that would fundamentally alter the compatibility of RA2 ???

That's weird and I have absolutely no idea, mate. It's interesting though! Maybe your cousin changed his computer hardware? What are his computer hardware specs? And what exactly does your mod do?

Edited by Sustanon, 27 December 2015 - 07:35 PM.

[gulyas]

That's just it, my mod worked fine on his machines in previous years, and like I say some update to my mod became impossible for him to play, and no matter what I tried to alter or fix, he couldn't play...   mine always worked since I always ran with win98 compatibility.

 

So the crash appeared to be a standard access violation, the kind I was getting with a corrupted mix file, which does happen now and then with the XCC tools... so the compatibility modes must affect how the game loads the various mix files, but I don't understand how or why.