An XP problem

[krisamb5]

Ok, I stop playing this game for about 2 months. When I came back to it I had xp sp1, and it works fine until 1700BC. When it reaches here it moves eveything that needs to be moved but than just freezes. Everything on my computer is up-to-date. I also tried the compability thing and I believe I tried every option their. The map that I'm playing on it the europe map available on civ3.com. I did redo the rules, but all I did was change the colors and starting treasury.

[Ethelred]

Have you installed the 1.29f patch?

Did you fiddle with your swap file? Is it big enough? Civ III will use a LOT of memory.

DON'T use the compatibility setting for Civ III. It runs fine in native XP and for some using the compatibility setting was the cause of the problems they had. Some have had problems after installing the XP service pack. It may be they had tweaked their machine and the service pack messed it up.

Since you are playing a mod and didn't mention playing the game unmodded, can you play a game to the end if its not modded? Mods can break your system even if Civ III runs fine unmodded.

[krisamb5]

Have you installed the 1.29f patch?

yes I did

Did you fiddle with your swap file? Is it big enough? Civ III will use a LOT of memory.

I really don't know what you mean. I hav 512 Ram

DON'T use the compatibility setting for Civ III. It runs fine in native XP and for some using the compatibility setting was the cause of the problems they had. Some have had problems after installing the XP service pack. It may be they had tweaked their machine and the service pack messed it up.

I tried it with and without the sp. I also tried Civ3 with compatibility mode off. When it kept freezing I turned it on.

Since you are playing a mod and didn't mention playing the game unmodded, can you play a game to the end if its not modded? Mods can break your system even if Civ III runs fine unmodded.

I believe I tried it unmodded

[vmxa1]

Swap file is the amount of space set aside for the system to page into. It is best to set it to the min and max as the same at a size that suits you environment. 1000 should be fine for 512MB. I just had a crash on a game I got from here, I suspect modding, because it is reproducable.

[krisamb5]

Ok, I put off custom rules and I'm down to 110BC without any problems, except that greedy Greece which seems to be building a base by the border line.

[Ethelred]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by krisamb5

I really don't know what you mean. I hav 512 Ram

512 may not be enough without at least a moderate sized swap file (AKA paging file or virtual memory setting). If you didn't fiddle with it, and not knowing what it is implies that you didn't, than the default setting should work. Assuming you have enough hard drive space that is. If you only have a half gig of free drive space that could be a problem.

I tried it with and without the sp. I also tried Civ3 with compatibility mode off. When it kept freezing I turned it on.

Since it is still freezing turn it off. It works better for most with it off.

I believe I tried it unmodded

Since you installed the patch?

Other things you can try.

Clean the disk.

Then uninstall the game AND delete the Civ III folder to make sure everthing is gone.

Then run scan disk and defrag. Defrag can take a while so you might want to run overnight if you haven't run it recently. Takes more time as the hard drive fills up as well.

Then reinstall the game and then the patch.

I just did this myself because something was messed up and I couldn't access the F9 Palace screen. I think I accidently modded the stanard .BIC file. which IRC will block the F9 screen for some reason.

If you do try unintstall, reinstall, repatch you might want to copy your save game folder to somewhere safe so you can use them again.

Unistall and reinstall does the trick for many. Sometimes the files just get corrupted. Especially if you aren't using the NTFS file system.

I doubt that you have a driver problem because that usually makes the game unplayable almost imedietly.

[vmxa1]

Swapping and paging are often talked about as the same thing, but to an old mainframer they are not. Pages are written to a pagefile and swap files are for swapping blocks of pages controlled by swap sets.
If you want to set the file in XP, go to the control panel and select systems. Select advance tab, performance area use the setting button. You get the performance options and take advanced. Go to virtual mem and select changes. Here you can set the inital value and the max to 1000 or whatever you want, if you have the disk space. It requires a reboot to take effect. Hopefuly I did not omit ant sets, but if I did it should be obvious.