SMAC blues

[Barry Brenesal]

Over the last 2 weeks, for no discernable reason, my copy of SMAC has simply ceased to respond.

This isn't a TERRAN.EXE crash issue. Rather, when I startup the game, it shows the Firaxis Games loading screen, then stops accessing the harddrive and freezes. I have to give it the old three-fingered salute to close out the attempted load.

From everything that I can tell, nothing new has been added or modified in memory since the last time I successfully played. I even tried removing the very few TSR's I've got--all that I can afford, in fact, leaving just enough to handle the keyboard and Windows, itself. The basics, that work with everything. No deal.

I thought I'd check here before calling Firaxis, and see if anybody else has encountered this, and if so, what solutions they successfully applied.

[stuntman19]

Hey Barry,

Sorry to here the bad news and I feel your pain. This may be a reach, but is your game fully installed on the hard drive? I had a similar problem with smac last summer and it was due to my CDrom drive. It didn't happen all the time, but enough to be annoying. I finally put in a new CDrom drive and no troubles since.
Anyway it might be worth a try if you have a backup CDrom drive to try the game on. For some reason music CD's would play on the old one but smac had probs.

Good luck

[Barry Brenesal]

Stuntman, thanks, but it isn't drive-related. My copy is fully installed, and has played well without the CD since I first got it (minus the video clips, which are excellent, but not after you've seen them the first 500 times). My drive works for everything else, as well.

No, in this case, there is literally no harddrive activity after that Firaxis Games screen comes up. The application simply dies.

[Deimos]

Barry,

See: http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum12/HTML/001318.html

[Barry Brenesal]

Deimos, thanks. Your reply didn't present the solution, but it provided a hint, which I followed up.

Apparently, SMAC just doesn't like changes being made in the chosen audio output device. I'd switched my audio over after buying Total Recorder, an excellent little tool for recording and converting MP3 and WAV files.

As soon as the music output device was returned to my AWE card, SMAC gleefully ran as before. Very interesting problem, that. And delighted I am at a solution.