Scramble Bug?

[VoodooChild]

In a fight with the Spartans and we both have air power.

Anytime one of us scrambles one of our fighters to cover an air attack the game crashes and I go back to desktop.

I have the SMACX patch (2.0 I believe)

Thanks for any advice

[stuntman19]

hmm......never heard that one before...what are the specs of your PC?

[VoodooChild]

PII MMX 366
64 RAM
Manufactor Installed Crystal Sound Fusion cards

[Aredhran]

That's an old one. I don't recall any fix or workaround for it however (it never happened to me personally).

You might fight some additional information in the bug list on this forum.

Aredhran

[Misotu]

This sounds like the standard terran.exe or terranx.exe bug. I used to suffer from it a lot, to the point where I had to abandon games.

What fixed it for me, and quite a few other people too, is killing the process relating to your mousewheel software:

mswheel.exe is one
I think point32.exe is another one

It doesn't fix it for everyone though. Best of luck!

- Mis

[VoodooChild]

well thats prob it.... terranx illegal operation and I have a new optical mouse with wheel that I didn't have last time I played.

Now the problem is, I don't want to take off the wheel. I hope there is someone working on trying to make sure SMACx keep compatible with current technologies.

[stuntman19]

VC,

Has this happened in all your games when fighters scramble? or just specific to this particular game?
Maybe send me an e-mail stunt_man_19@yahoo.com, as this might take awhile posting back and forth on the threads as I don't always check them daily.

[Helium Pond]

I doubt there's anyone working to do anything further to SMAc or SMAX. What it is, is what it is.

[VoodooChild]

Thats good to hear.... *sigh*

Ok it has been awhile since I have played with bat files (pre windows 95), so does anyone know of a way that I can turn off the mouse wheel before playing SMAC, and turning it back on after I'm done?

I'm looking for an easy way to switch back and forth. I did a quick scan of my mouse, and only saw options for my current mouse and none for a standard mouse.

Thanks for all the help everyone.

[Darius]

I have found that killing mswheel solves the problem for me maybe 80% of the time. To prevent crashes all the time, I have to also quit my antivirus program. I have never crashed when I remember to do both. (By the way, I have two computers. One has a wheelmouse, the other doesn't. Even on the one without a wheelmouse, it still crashes during a scramble if I leave the antivirus running.)

If you kill mswheel.exe, the wheel still works in SMAC/X. I believe that SMAC/X implements its own wheel driver, which conflists with Mswheel, causing the crash.

Unfortunately, I do not know of an easy way to automatically disable a program or driver, then restart it later.

[Misotu]

What I do is I have the PC load the mouse wheel driver etc as usual. When I want to play SMAC/X, I kill the appropriate process using ctrl alt del or a process viewer. I can never remember how to reload the stupid thing once I've killed it - I suppose you just run mswheel.exe? But I don't bother - I can just reboot. Only takes a couple of minutes.

By the way, I've had the same experience with the virus program I run. The mouse wheel is definitely the major problem, but I remember I managed to force one crashing game to continue by getting rid of the wheel and the virus programs.

I noticed that the mouse wheel still worked in SMAC - now I know why. How interesting.

[VoodooChild]

I made it through the turn with no crashes *YEAH* had to turn off both my anti-virus and mouse wheel to do it, but thats OK.

Some food for thought...
if you double click on the mouse icon in the lower right of windows it will pull your mouse properties. Mine has a wheel tab that if you click on advance will let you disengage the wheel for different programs. When I did this for terranx, I still get the crash, but may work for other programs

if you right click on the mouse icon you can close intellipoint and not get the crash. It will reload the next time you boot.

thanks everyone for all your help