Invalid Page Faults in the 3rd Age

[jchell]

Well! I'm new here. I've lurk4d for quite a while. I joined so that I could post this epistle.

First things first, I love this game. Best I've done is a spaceship win at Monarch level as the French,

Lately, I've been playing the babylonians at monarch level on the promised land map using the latest patch (121f) and no other mods, when suddenly I get a repeatable invalid page fault in 1485 a.d.. It happens when the game is in the transition to the next year mode. The funny thing is it's the exact same error as the one reported in the civ help forum in the bug faq v2.0 entitled Illegal Operations in the third age.

I have had this happen before, usually when I'm kicking AI butt. In this game, I had at least 95% of the central island and was building railroads, researching replacable parts (one of my favorite techs, get those workers crackin'), making a couple hundred coin a turn and buying tech with my excess luxuries. Oh baby!

Usually, when something like thi happened, I just started a new game, this time I wanted to keep going,figuring I could get a conquer the world win.

I tried updating all drivers including the new directx 8.1, playing a round with the video settings, turning the sound off, making sure all the little programs that build up in the os as you add software weren't running, I even went back a couple of years and changed some stuff and the error remained (although when I went back in time the error did not occur in the exact same spot):

So, here's my setup:

homemade system:
windows 98 se
hercules mx II /mx400
driver: 23.11
asus a7v mobo bios 1.007
512 mb memory
athlon t-bird 1 gig
tekram 390f scsi w/
2 9 gig drives
1 plextor cd-rom
1 plextor cd-r
aopen awe320 audio
drivr v 4.07

Is there any hope? Can someone help? Is Firaxis or Infrogrames ( great name huh?) out theres somewhere? Please tell me there's a fix for this.

My save game is attached for your pleasure. But it ain't fun folks

[jchell]

No, I didn't try that. When the crash first occurred, though, I had just completed researching replaceable parts, and was going on to sanitation, when in the transition from 1485 to 1490, the invalid page fault occurred.

I went back to 1470 and slowed down the resarch so that I wouldn't learn replaceable parts at the same time, but the crash occurrred anyway, during the same transition, but at a slightly different time. I saved the error as two word files, so I can post it if it would help.

I searched the infrograemes site, and the civ3 site, and even called the automated help line at infrograemes, but there was not even a mention of this error. I find that odd since it was first mentioned by merrimtc in the apolyton help forum on 12-17-2001, almost five months ago.

I must say that it's quite frustrating to put so many hours into a game and have it crash when things are going so well. Im wondering whether I should start another game or wait for this issue to be addressed.

[jchell]

I was thinking that I should post the error message. Here it is.



CIVILIZATION3 caused an invalid page fault in
module CIVILIZATION3.EXE at 015f:004030c3.
Registers:
EAX=0a5431e0 CS=015f EIP=004030c3 EFLGS=00010246
EBX=00000000 SS=0167 ESP=00abf3dc EBP=000002da
ECX=00000000 DS=0167 ESI=0b2686cc FS=12bf
EDX=00000001 ES=0167 EDI=00000001 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
8b 79 78 8b 47 04 85 c0 75 06 8b 17 8b cf ff 12
Stack dump:
00000001 0b268560 abffffc7 f38ff9f9 eded73f3 3be7e757 db1fe1e1 dad81ddb 17cbc91a ab14bcba 9e9c11ad 0b8f8d0e 6f08807e
6c6c0771 fcf9f9c2 d456fbfb

It may also be of interest that Merrimtc and I share the same operating system, win98 se, and cpu brand amd, although mine is an athlon t-bird 1 gig and merrimtc's is a 400mhz k6.

Please help solve this riddle. I'm itchin to play again but don't want to suffer the same fate.

By the way, this map, the promised land from the civ 3 site, is a great way to crush the AI. If you are first to the central island and can settle the majority of it, if not all like I did, the AI hasn't got a prayer.

cya

jay

[jchell]

Thanks for your help. It's a shame to spend so much timew developing a civ only to lose to a bug. (kind of like the movie "them" from the 1950's!)

I hope firaxis is watching. We need them to fix this.