Matrix animation freezing on WinXP

[leastonh1]

Hi,

I bought HTTR the other day and have had no end of trouble trying to get it to run under Windows XP. It works perfectly on my Windows 2000 PC though, so I'm not completely stuck. I'm just baffled and really, really fed up with XP.

When I run the game the screen goes black as normal, but instead of seeing the Matrix animation, I simply see the first "0" (zero) of the animation in the middle of the screen and that's it. Windows freezes (including the keyboard) and I have no option but to hard reset.

I'm trying to get it to run on the following spec PC: Athlon XP 1800+, 512Mb DDR RAM, WinXP SP1, DX9.0b, Radeon 7000 with the latest drivers. I did manage to find one single entry in the event logs on XP stating that there had been an "Application Hang" with a generic event code (1002 iirc), so Technet was no help (surprise, surprise!). The file that caused the crash was "intro.dat", which ties in with the problem I'm having.

I am pretty certain there is absolutely nothing wrong with the DirectX install as I've checked through it several times and reinstalled. The crash hasn't added an event log entry except for that one time because Windows halts before the crash can be trapped.

Any suggestions would be very welcome.

Cheers,
Jim.

[RedDevil]

You may delete the animations and see what happens... [8|]

Actually I did the same just for the sake of speed although instead of deleting them I just renamed them so that I can still watch them (the third one is nice [:)])

Anyway, hope that helps.

Cheers,

RedDevil

[leastonh1]

Hi RedDevil,

Cracking idea, thank you [:)] I'll give it a try and will post the result tomorrow.

Regards,
Jim.

[Arjuna]

Jim,

Can you send us DX report of your machine - see the sticky thread at the top for details on how to produce this. Send it to "support[at]panthergames[dot]com" and I'll see if I can spot what's causing this. It runs perfectly fine on our XP machines here. So I suspect you have installed something incompatible.

Can you run the Matrix avi file from explorer by double-clicking it?

[leastonh1]

Hi Arjuna,

I will do, but I want to reformat first to completely eliminate the obvious. Although all the DX9 tests ran perfectly, I couldn't run the Matrix avi file without Windows freezing, so I think there must be an underlying problem with either one of the codecs (despite updates being installed) or possibly the media player code itself. When you suggested I try playing the avi seperately, I also tried several other movies of various flavours (avi, mpeg etc.) and only mpeg's would play properly.

I'm back to running the game on my main Win2k PC again now and it works well so far (played the whole of tutorial 1 and part way through tutorial 2). Once I get XP running, I'll let you know how things are with a vanilla install of the OS along with at least SP1. I generally don't use the 2k PC for games as it's a development machine, but am making an exception because I can't resist playing this awesome game!

Thank you for the help so far, much appreciated [:)]

Regards,
Jim

[Arjuna]

Jim,

Sounds good. If you can't play any avi file then you are right about it being a problem with either the codecs or your media player software. Let me know how it goes. Enjoy.