SPwaw 4.5 Error message

Christophe Jaureguiberry · Sun Dec 24, 2000 9:42 am

I've had this bug in the following instance:

I am presently creating a scenario. After placing the units on the map, I go for my first test - bug doesn't appear. Then I program a few objectives and waypoints for units. Second test - I have the bug. It does not influence the game (in solitaire) except that it slows down scrolling and computer reaction time.

Hope this can help.

Christophe

Anzac · Post by **Anzac** » Sun Dec 24, 2000 9:44 am

WOW! You guys sure do know your pcs. All this talk of ninja machines has me drooling. As a certified A+ technician who knows a thing or two about pcs I can honestly say Arralen does know what he's talking about!

And Peregrine I have to say tsk tsk about overclocking your Celeron. Hope it is worth it!

I have a 466 with 64MB myself and SPWAW runs flawlessly. Anyway I've yet to install 4.5 but I hope everything runs fine.

Happy gaming folks!

P.S. Is there any other A+ (or better) techies out there?

------------------
Anzac

"Lest We Forget"

Harry · Post by **Harry** » Sun Dec 24, 2000 10:28 am

Hi!

I have a AMD 333 MHz with 64MB and Win95.
SPWAW 4.5:
I tested a online-game against myself, because last time I played online I got a "Less then 5 MB of virtual memory" warning and SPWAW exits.

I have a fixed 128MB swap-file (it really is a pagingfile).

After launching and connecting to the internet (to simulate a connection) and quiting all unecessary applications, I have the following memory available:
Free Physical : 33 MB
Free Pagingfile: 128 MB

After launching SPWAW I choose "online game" then craete a battle (meeting engagement, june 41, ger vs sov, 2000 points, small map) looking at the map, do the shopping and enter myself as axis and start the game.

After deploying, my firts turn: SPWAW is very slow, because everytime I move the map, my HD-LED is blinking and I hear my HD working. During the deployment the scrolling were "smooth". Either he acceses the Pagefile for reading, or worse he is still allocating memory. Before finishing my turn I ALT-TAB out of SPWAW.
Now my memory looks like this:
Free Physical: 1 MB
Free Pagingfile: 50 MB

Turns 2:
Free Physical: 1 MB
Free Pagingfile: 46 MB

Turn 3:
Free Physical: 1 MB
Free Pagingfile: 45 MB

Turn 4:
Free Physical: 0 MB
Free Pagingfile: 44 MB

dd
But: After exiting SPWAW I have:

Free Physical: 35 MB
Free Pagingfile: 128 MB

So the cleaning up is well done!

It seems SPWAW eats a lot of memory....

[This message has been edited by Harry (edited December 24, 2000).]

Arralen · Post by **Arralen** » Mon Dec 25, 2000 4:16 pm

????

It has gone away and I have absolutly no clue why ?!

On the other hand, I haven't seen a rec-file grow larger than 1,8MB since, despite of arty barrages and all ?!

So maybe the game decided to revert back to limited file size as I do not play e-mail games at all

Arralen

Warhorse · Post by **Warhorse** » Mon Dec 25, 2000 8:24 pm

Interestingly enough, I only get this error message on WF, but not in my campaign which is at least 5 times the size!!??

steel · Post by **steel** » Mon Dec 25, 2000 11:18 pm

It is happening here too, allocate memory not fit or something like that .Anyone out there knows what may be causing this error message?

I have win98
128mb ram
soundblaster live
6,5 Gt
Asus Geforce2 display adapter
celeron 333mhz

steel

Cona · Post by **Cona** » Tue Dec 26, 2000 4:46 am

Haven't seen this error yet. Since i read this message i've making several test and nothing - can't reproduce the error on my machine.
I'm running:

P. 233 MMX
96 MB RAM
96 MB fixed swapfile.
PCI video card (may the problem be those AGP video cards and the shared RAM + lots of resident program ?)
4 GB HDD (SPWAW)
9 GB HDD (swapfile + W98 SE)

Vcache is tweaked:
Chunck 1024 KB.
MaxSize: 10240 KB.
File Names Cache 2048.
Directory Cache 64.

I'm able to run any scenario and campaign even with Word and Excel 2000 opened while connected to internet (doesn't work while winamp is playing

but never did).
I've installed version 4.0 and patches 4.1, 4.2, 4.4 and 4.5

Hope this helps.

Feliz Año Nuevo a todos,
Cona.

Anzac · Post by **Anzac** » Tue Dec 26, 2000 7:24 am

Alas I spoke too soon! I too am having the same problem as Harry. I got rid of steel.prf and then installed the 4.5 update.

I started a WB scenario No Easy Place and twice in the AI's turn it has crashed to the desktop after displaying the less than 5 mb of virtual memory.

I have a 466 Celeron with 64MB of ram running Windows 98. My swapfile is fixed at 128MB. I hasten to add that ever since version 1.0 this game has been rock solid and never crashed! There must be something wrong with this update. Is it possible to go back to version 4.4 from this one?

I hope that all the boffins are working on it.

------------------
Anzac

"Lest We Forget"

Peregrine Falcon · Post by **Peregrine Falcon** » Tue Dec 26, 2000 8:56 pm

Yep! You are absolutely right

Pretty lousy overclocking (+74/75mhz) but overclocking it to +400mhz seems to cause problems with several games I play....

(not SPWAW, but something else I dont want to mention in this board

)

DVD's eat all my money now. No time (or money) to upgrade my PC all the time

Originally posted by Anzac:

And Peregrine I have to say tsk tsk about overclocking your Celeron. Hope it is worth it!

Joe Osborne · Post by **Joe Osborne** » Tue Dec 26, 2000 11:50 pm

Folks,

I was getting this message when I was opening a campaign turn in "Watchword Freedom". I was using all my open HD space for my swap file. I went and adjusted my swap file size to be twice my RAM, and then insured I had at least 20 mb of HD space beyond that.

I then went and opened up the campaign Heroes of the Motherland...ran through about a half dozen turns and the error message went away.

It looks like you have to carefully set up your swapfile and HD size, and then the prob goes away. I haven't tested this with scenarios.

Joe Osborne

[This message has been edited by Joe Osborne (edited December 26, 2000).]

Warhorse · Post by **Warhorse** » Wed Dec 27, 2000 12:33 am

Last night I never got the error message at all!!!??? Wonder what the giggie is?

------------------
Mike Amos
Meine Ehre Heisst Treue

BruceAZ · Post by **BruceAZ** » Thu Dec 28, 2000 8:18 am

I am getting the same error message. I am letting Win manage the mem so that may be a solution or the problem. It seems to happen during campaign play. I have a Dell P3 500, 256RAM and 3.3 Gig available.

------------------
"The most important element in war is man. And there are no tougher men than my China Marines." Major Gen. Archer 'Archy' Vandegrift, 1st Marine Division

Kharan · Post by **Kharan** » Wed Jan 03, 2001 5:11 am

When I had the error message, Cacheman reported I had 56MB free RAM and 82MB free of my 100MB fixed swap file (with SPWAW still running). Weird.

I don't think it actually affects VCR recording, so maybe you could just remove the message.

[This message has been edited by Kharan (edited January 02, 2001).]

Anzac · Post by **Anzac** » Wed Jan 03, 2001 8:15 am

Happy New Year from deep down south in NZ folks!

Regarding the crash to desktop problem it seems to happen when system resources are low. If I do a clean boot I can get thru 5 or 6 turns b4 it repeats itself. Once when I loaded SPWAW up it displayed the msg in the game menu. That was after not having booted for a while so that might be the problem...

To all the SPWAW boffins out there are you working on this problem? It has only happened in version 4.5 and considering you didn't add that much to this version I'm left wondering what on earth is using the system resources so much! And another thing, apart from the one time it crashed from the game menu it always does this during the AIs turn. Always!

So as you can imagine I always save at the end of my turn now 'cos I hate repeating myself! In any case I hope my observations will help in your efforts to squash this nasty bug.

Happy troubleshooting folks!

------------------
Anzac

"Lest We Forget"

JWW · Post by **JWW** » Wed Jan 03, 2001 9:11 am

I got the message, too, when I started the Tulagi campaign. I stopped and went to the Tutorial scenario and go tthe message again. I exited and entered the program again and started a new campaign (the US-USSR, whatever that is called, slipped my memory) and haven't seen the problem since. Don't know as much about computers as most of ya'll. I would simply like to know:
1. Is it okay to continue playing if you see the message?
2. Is there a simple fix that will not affect other programs?
3. Will this be patched?
I'm running a 433Celeron with about 1.5GB free on my hard drive and 96MB RAM.

Kharan · Post by **Kharan** » Thu Jan 04, 2001 1:09 am

A friend was playing secure PBEM and had the error message when he opened the turn AND when he pressed the VCR button. It was only the second turn and the replay didn't have anything in it so it can't be said if the error message would have prevented the replay being shown. Rec file was only a few hundred KB's.

He restarted SPWAW and the turn again, this time no error message.

When I had the error message, it was shown every turn. When I restarted SPWAW without closing any other windows, no errors.

So it's some kind of memory allocation thing at the start of SPWAW which affects every game you try until quitting.

JWW · Post by **JWW** » Fri Jan 05, 2001 7:30 am

I don't think we ever got a good answer to this "unable to allocate memory for VCR recording" problem. Several questions come up.
1. Is this something we can fix ourselves without affecting something else?
2. If not, will it be patched?
3. If we get the msg, can we continue playing the scenario without other problems.

BruceAZ · Post by **BruceAZ** » Fri Jan 05, 2001 9:26 am

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Arralen:
Windows uses swap file which it makes to it's own purposes and shares it to other applications.

Correct. File is "Win386.swp"

Size of the file is usually 20megs,

Wrong. With default settings, Windows sets the file size dynamically. It starts with around 20Mb, but may grow as big as RAM available.
There are unconfirmed reports that Win9x does not use any SwapFile-space that exceeds the available RAM, but I'm not shure about this.

so if it's full you'll get error like above Melvin has.

Most likely wrong - Win would enlarge the file size, that's all, and with 64 MB RAM and therefore 64MB Swapfile you should be able to store a 30MB vcr file, shouldn't you ?

Windows creates the swapfile if your win is configured as a server.

If you don't create swapfile, windows uses whole disk to it.

Wrong. Win creates swapfile by default, even on a 512MB machine. When set to "server" Win handles file transfers, caching etc. different, what is said to push performance.

I'm getting this error myself, but I have 101MB swapfile (free), 128MB RAM (73MB free w/o SPWAW), 273MB free "TEMP" disc space, 45MB disk on the drive with SPWAW
and only 3MB on C:

So question is, where does SPWAW put this file?

And may this error be cause by a software-diskcache (vcache with Win9x) that is smaller than the vcr-file may be ?
(Mine is set to 16MB fix, but on most Win-machines run with standard settings which do not restrict the cache size, so it may use all available RAM )

I'll look further into this and keep you informed 'bout what I can find out
*********************
Hi Arralen:

How do you adjust the standard settings? I have 256MB of RAM (win manages the virtual memory settings) with plenty of hard disk available yet still getting the error message?

------------------
"The most important element in war is man. And there are no tougher men than my China Marines." Major Gen. Archer 'Archy' Vandegrift, 1st Marine Division

Reg · Post by **Reg** » Fri Jan 05, 2001 3:25 pm

I just installed 4.5 and this problem appeared.

For your fault finding info, it occurs when I play a PBEM game againsy my self WITHOUT closing down SPWaW after each turn. Close down the game and restart afresh for the other player turn and everything works perfectly. Definitely a resource allocation problem, but if you are playing someone over the net it shouldn't be a problem (but a good thing to be aware of)!!!

Has anyone else noticed that the game tends to slow down (scrolling, vehicle movement etc) after you have loaded several games in a single session? Probably related to the same thing. It appears that a reboot is required to free things up in this situation.

Just my personal observations,
Reg.

frank1970 · Post by **frank1970** » Fri Jan 05, 2001 4:30 pm

It happened to me,too. I had given a printjob to my printer. The printer was out of paper and never started. I deleted the print order in the printer manager. After that I started SPWaW and got the error message" not enough ram for VCR file".
I ended SPWAW, and shut down windows. Windows told me that my print orders would be lost when shutting down now! SOo it really seems to be a Windows memory manager problem.
I have a celeron 600, 128 MB RAM and a 10 GB harddisk with about 3GB free.