Tuesday, February 10, 2009

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

So I still feel like complete hell today (although at least marginally better than yesterday), but in a totally unexpected bit of news, I can play King's Bounty again.

Thanks to you guys.

Fong volunteered to test my last save on his 32-bit Vista system, and so did Andrew (also using 32-bit Vista). Both could finish the battle I kept crashing on with no problem. They also sent me a screen print of their running processes from Task Manager.

I said I have a simple setup, and I do, but I do have a Wacom Tablet (the Bamboo) installed, so the first thing I tried was removing that and using a conventional mouse.

That didn't work, but I kept it unplugged just to simplify things. I noticed that neither one of the testers had Sidebar enabled, so I turned it off (all I had on it was the clock). I also noticed that Fong said he had 16-bit anisotropic filtering enabled in the game, while I only had 4-bit.

I started the game, changed to 16-bit AF in the options menu, and started the battle of death (for me, anyway, since I've played it 15-20 times and crashed every time).

This time, though--no problem.

I experimented with different combinations of those three changes, and the game would crash every time unless I used all three changes (unplugged tablet, Sidebar off, and 16-bit AF enabled in-game). With all three, though, I've played for over 3 hours in the last day or so with no crashes.

That's not flaky or anything, and by that I mean that it's entirely flaky.

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