Steel Panthers Crashing to Desktop in 4-Color Mode

[cer7711]

Steel Panthers World At War v. 7.1 keeps crashing to the desktop in 4-color mode on me. Very curious. I am running Win 98/SE & Direct X 8.1 on a 2.2gig Pentium IV w/ 512mb RAM, MSI GeForce IV Ti4600 on an MSI mb w/ Intel chipset.

The crash is an irregular occurance. It can occur anywhere from 5 minutes to a half hour or more into the game. Has anyone else experienced this problem? You're playing the game, when suddenly you are dumped back to the desktop, staring at the "Steel Panthers" start-up screen in lovely four-color mode?

Here's how it happened to me last night: Maj Wittman (in a scenario I built) crashed into the woods in his KonigsTiger. I was in hot pursuit of some trucks which were hiding in the lower right corner of the map board. After blasting them at point-blank range with high explosive and heavy machinegun fire, the trucks charged into my hex. I nebelwerfered them and gave em a few more rounds of HE, which is when the game dumped me to the desktop. As I had racked up sixty kills and the scenario was all but over I wasn't terribly upset, but I have had this random crash bug hit me earlier in other games.

Does anyone have any advice and/or help for me?

[Supervisor]

Due you run the game from the auto-run menu, if so edit your short to point to :\MatrixGames\Steel Panthers World at War\mech.exe. This will bypass the autorun menu and start the game directly. Also whayt type of sound card are you using, is the 7.1 a full install or did you upgrade to it. Delete these files in the :\MatrixGames\Steel Panthers World at War\save the steel.prf and holder.txt(if you have one)

[cer7711]

Thanks for the quick help!

I purchased the CD-Rom of SPWAW direct from customer support. I have since installed the 7.1 upgrade.

My sound card is a SB Audigy, but I had this problem with the SB Live as well.

I will try running it by bypassing the autostart menu, as you suggested.

My shortcut on the desktop points to the SteelPanthers start-up icon.

[cer7711]

Well, I ran SPWAW from the Mech.exe as you suggested, bypassing the auto-start menu.

The game STILL crashes to the desktop in four-color mode whenever I start racking up truck kills at the end of my scenario.

It will also crash in this manner at random intervals during other scenarios, though this is an intermittent problem.

Anyone have any ideas? SPWAW doesn't seem to like my MSI GeForce IV video card in my MSI motherboard w/ Intel chipset!

[Supervisor]

Try adjusting the video card resolution settings, like 800x600 16 bit this is what SPWAW was designed to run at. Make sure you have the most updated Nvidia drivers. I use a Xtasy TI 4400 and have no problems at all. Make sure all other drivers are the latest. Disable all programs running in the background. I ran into numerous reliability problems in genral on my new system until I updtaed to Win XP, the newer harware no days are optimized and coded to specifically utilize it. By no means am I trying to plug MS, I hate having to update my O/S every fews years at an unreasonable price just so they can stay rice as much as the next guy.