Windows XP Pro and SMACX

[Dobrovolets]

So I'm running XP Pro, having upgraded from W2K Pro SP2. Some jiggling with the compatibility wizard on terran.exe (setting the OS to emulate W2K) has persuaded SMAC to run, but SMACX keeps bombing out after the "start game" dialogue with an error in smacx.icd.

Has anyone got a fix for this?

Hello to all, incidentally, from this brand new subscriber.

[SITS]

Re: Windows XP Pro and SMACX

Originally posted by Dobrovolets
So I'm running XP Pro, having upgraded from W2K Pro SP2. Some jiggling with the compatibility wizard on terran.exe (setting the OS to emulate W2K) has persuaded SMAC to run, but SMACX keeps bombing out after the "start game" dialogue with an error in smacx.icd.

Has anyone got a fix for this?

Hello to all, incidentally, from this brand new subscriber.

Hello and welcome!

As to your problem - have you upgraded your chip? SMAC has problems with some of the newer chips and you have to change the .ini file. You'll find details in the readme file.... Hope this helps.

[Dobrovolets]

Thanks for that. I'll look at the readme - however, this configuration was working beautifully under W2K Pro. The machine is a fairly ordinary twin PII-500 with 512MB RAM, so nothing too sexy or modern

[Bruce205]

Had same problem last night (I have p4 and it said CPU was not supported)
I tried this link and it worked http://techsupport.ea.com/
Hope it helps

[Dobrovolets]

Ah, sadly, it's not a P4 problem - the machine is SMP 2 x 500 MHz processors and ran SMACX very happily under W2K. SMAC still plays well enough, so I suspect it's something ill-behaved in smacx.icd

[Ned]

D, I have XP Home, and SMACX works to an extent. It crashes now and then, but I can recover.

IIRC, SMAC v 4.0 had worked out a lot of the bugs that caused crashes. These were, however, reintroduced with SMACx and not fully corrected with v2.0.

The worst crash bug had to do with the wheelmouse. Disable that, and many of your crash problems, at least in Win98, disappear.

I tried disabling the wheelmouse in XP, but did not notice any difference in SMACx crashing. What does seem to have an effect, though, is game size. This implies a resource allocation issue.

So, try eliminating all other tasks and running SMAXx with a tiny planet.

Ned

[Googlie]

Have had XP Home since Friday morning and played, oh, maybe 20 hours of smac/x.

Only crashes have been when I've put a unit in the top row of the map, then I'm stuck - can't move it and get a terranx.exe crash (doesn't happen with smac, funnily enough)

No big deal with SP games if not on ironman, but a pain in PBEMs (just happened once, luckily enough - then I got wise)

G.

[Dobrovolets]

Originally posted by Ned
D, I have XP Home, and SMACX works to an extent. It crashes now and then, but I can recover.

IIRC, SMAC v 4.0 had worked out a lot of the bugs that caused crashes. These were, however, reintroduced with SMACx and not fully corrected with v2.0.

The worst crash bug had to do with the wheelmouse. Disable that, and many of your crash problems, at least in Win98, disappear.

I tried disabling the wheelmouse in XP, but did not notice any difference in SMACx crashing. What does seem to have an effect, though, is game size. This implies a resource allocation issue.

So, try eliminating all other tasks and running SMAXx with a tiny planet.

Ned

Interesting. I don't even get as far as starting a game - but I will try the smaller planet dodge - I tend to go for huge automatically... clearly a macho thing

[Googlie]

Dobrovolets:

I start using the smac or smax icon, that I've dragged to my desktop (axstart?) - have the opening movie disabled, and am not using the no-cd crack.

I get the message "CPU not supported", but I just click "OK" and it loads, any size planet, and esp the 256 x 256 max that I too like to play on.

G.

[Simple Girl]

Hello
I do have problems with SMAC too on Windows SP,
when I start the game without CD, it brings a window saying:

"Application popup: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: terran.exe - No Disk : There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive G:".

then it brings another window saying that CD is not there and i will miss some features unless complete install was chosen, but this message is usual, always happened before.
But message seems to be Win XP problem, I heard it is typical NT bug, but have no idea how to get rid of it, just really annoying. Any programmers here?
Thanks

[Ned]

IIRC, SMAC could be played without the CD, but with limited features unless a full install were selected. So, your message seems "normal" and not a bug. SMACX requires the CD, unless you use a no-CD hack. However, the no CD hack crashes quite a bit in XP.

Just a note as a branch off from the XP hard crash thread: I am now playing a game with a Huge map. No crashes to date. The pattern remains: any map larger than Huge seems to have crashes in XP.

Ned

[Simple Girl]

Hi Ned, thanks for reply!
This is strange, I never had message like this with win98,
I have performed full install, and I am not using SMAX, I play SMAC wich doesnt have protection, except for this message that unless you have full install some game features wont be available. But now under Win Xp, there is this new message, and it is really annoying , does anyone get it too?

By the way, about second message, you can get rid of it if you edit a bit jackal.txt file in game directory, find this string:

#FILEFIND_NOCD

and replace it with

;#FILEFIND_NOCD

But still first message is a mystery.

[johndmuller]

Dobrovolets,

Is XP Pro really an upgrade from W2K? I've been wondering what the differences were supposed to be (as they both list for about the same price); XP Pro is a bit newer and one would expect that it can set up easier for home use, but I would have thought that Microsoft would hold out on at least some feature to keep the NT line a bit more powerful than the Win95 line.

Regarding your problem, I assume that you have looked for any patches, fixes, SvcPaks, etc that might address the problem. As I recall, there was a (game) compatibility patch for W2k shortly after its release; perhaps likewise XP?

Have you checked out the MS knowledge base? Sometimes searching for whatever strings, addresses, etc that are returned with the error can be surprisingly on target (remember I said sometimes).

I've been running SMAC & SMAX on NT4 for some time now with bad sound, but without major substantive difficulties. At first I had degenerative crashes as if it were losing memory over time, but turning off the screen saver (it didn't seem to matter which one I had been using) made it very solid. I don't think that problem was particularlyl related to SMAC/X (perhaps to the motherboard's driver software?), but perhaps you've got a similar problem.

If you are running the no CD hack, perhaps it is not XP friendly.

If SMAX ran under W2K, it could suggest a possible driver problem - where a newer version exposed some incompatibility with SMAX; if you've got time on your hands, you could try to "retro" some of the drivers (like the video or (scrolling) mouse for example or the HD and/or CD drivers).

If you not only have time on your hands, but are also willing to risk your whole installation, you could try things like seeing if it will let you install some of the compatiblity patches or SPs for W2K.

Good Luck and Hi

[Googlie]

There is a Windows "patch" that I was offered as an upgrade under my automatic upgrade fearture of XP - it apparently will help resolve any (some?) incompatibility problems when using XP with progs written for 9X or ME.

Don't rmember what the patch was called - I installed it and since then the only problem has been the unit locking at the top tier of tiles on a max permitted map. I still get the annoying message on start-up that my CPU is not supported, (LOL I even get that too with Civ III) but I just OK now and everything seems to work just fine

G.

[Dobrovolets]

Originally posted by johndmuller
Dobrovolets,

Is XP Pro really an upgrade from W2K? I've been wondering what the differences were supposed to be (as they both list for about the same price); XP Pro is a bit newer and one would expect that it can set up easier for home use, but I would have thought that Microsoft would hold out on at least some feature to keep the NT line a bit more powerful than the Win95 line.

Strictly speaking, I suppose XP Pro shouldn't be installed on a home machine - it's specifically an industrial-strength business OS. On the other hand, XP Home is a crippled XP Pro so it should be functionally identical. XP finally sees the demise of the Win 9x code (and not a day too soon) and code overlap between consumer and business OS.

Regarding your problem, I assume that you have looked for any patches, fixes, SvcPaks, etc that might address the problem. As I recall, there was a (game) compatibility patch for W2k shortly after its release; perhaps likewise XP?

Have you checked out the MS knowledge base? Sometimes searching for whatever strings, addresses, etc that are returned with the error can be surprisingly on target (remember I said sometimes).

Certainly have. There is a wizard which allows you to con an executable into thinking that it's running on Windows for Playgroups, 2K or whatever - tried this, with identical results. The issue seems specifically to be with SMACX with the latest Firaxis service pack or patch or whatever they call it. I imagine I'll end up de- and re-installing the whole thing when I get back from the forthcoming business trip.

I've been running SMAC & SMAX on NT4 for some time now with bad sound, but without major substantive difficulties. At first I had degenerative crashes as if it were losing memory over time, but turning off the screen saver (it didn't seem to matter which one I had been using) made it very solid. I don't think that problem was particularlyl related to SMAC/X (perhaps to the motherboard's driver software?), but perhaps you've got a similar problem.

If you are running the no CD hack, perhaps it is not XP friendly.

If SMAX ran under W2K, it could suggest a possible driver problem - where a newer version exposed some incompatibility with SMAX; if you've got time on your hands, you could try to "retro" some of the drivers (like the video or (scrolling) mouse for example or the HD and/or CD drivers).

If you not only have time on your hands, but are also willing to risk your whole installation, you could try things like seeing if it will let you install some of the compatiblity patches or SPs for W2K.

Good Luck and Hi

I'm not that wedded to the game - XP has a very stable setup for everything else I do (and it plays Civ3 like an angel) - so I think I'll resign myself to not playing SMACX for a while...

Thanks to you and everyone else for the advice!