Matrix Games Forums

You play your senario for 4, 6, 8 hours only to have the game crash to the desk top late in the senario. I have had this happen more often as of late. I am running Windows 98, and have Zonealarm, and Norton running in the background. My computer is 500MGhrt, PentiumIII, 386 Megs of SD Ram and 24 meg Vodo Graphics excelerator card.
I was playing Senario Directive 33 for the first time. Doing pretty good and was on turn 18 when the game crashed. 8 hour marrathon down the drain. If you have played this senario you know how big the map is.

I ussually save the game periodically, but alas this time I did not. Well I guess I will go back to righting my AAR for Poltov Strikes.

Love the game, just frustrated with the amount of desktop crashes.

have enough resources available for the machine to use when running marathon games. With other programs running you'd be surprised how quickly RAM can be locked up while playing a game.
I have a 900Mhz/P3/512 RAM/64Voodoo and I have the FREE-RAM program installed. I checked it once while playing a SPWAW pbem turn and being online at the same time and my resources dove from 65% to under 12%. That's why I shut down everything but Nortons when I'm gaming.
Outside of that...I wish I could help more...I hate it when that happens to me. That's why I have become a "save freak" when I play....it's a pain, but it's better than seeing 8 hours go out the window!

Gary, I don't have any helpful suggestions to provide but I do like to offer my sympathy to you. I have similar experience where a long scenario went down the drain due to a sudden unexpected crash (well, there's no "expected crash"... :p ) I've also read in this forum where some other players have encountered crash. It's more like Bill Gates fault, in my opinion

I don't think the problem is restricted to MCLV. I've had a number of small scenarios crash to the desktop (just as things were getting interesting, too) on my system. I'm running a P3-800/512RAM/Win2K system with an Intel 810 display adapter on the motherboard.

I've formed a theory that the crashes may be related to other software that I've run between the time that the system was last restarted and when I launch SPWAW. If I start Steel Panthers from a fresh reboot, I don't encounter this problem.

Just another $0.02

I have found that many games will randomly crash if you have programs ESPECIALLY virus checkers like Norton and Macafee running in the background. If fact, many games tell you DO NOT RUN WITH VIRUS CHECKERS. This is even more true in XP.
I recommend you exit your background programs before loading and playing the game. I unplug my cable modem before booting so I don't need my checkers running while I'm "GAME DEDICATED!"
Good Luck!