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Before I begin, Stormhound and Chris C have to also take credit for this, as their posts got me to thinking along with a comment posted back to me by Grumbold inspiring me to take another look.
After taking a break for over a month from playing the game, I decided to attempt a fix that I believed would have no effect on the DX problem of mine; but what the hey, I've already tried everything else. I took my music CD (Disk 2) and copied it to the hard drive. Low and behold, guess what happened? No more DX errors! Now before several of you throw rotten eggs at me and say "Heck, we already knew that!", no one I have seen to date has suggested this fix for the DX errors, but only to save wear and tear on your CD player.
Why it works (or at least my theory)!
I suspect the reason that this may be the ultimate solution to the majority of DX problems is due to the fact that most folks optimize their CD-ROM drives for data retrieval, thus enabling the read-ahead feature. Unfortunately, I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that QS checks for the CD when ever the user switches to a new window. Since the music is already playing (the first thread accessing the drive), this is a second thread attempting to access the same disk drive. This is not recomended as CD's are ment to be accessed sequentially (i.e. by one thread, thus enabling the drive to read ahead). Since the cached portion of the CD information does not include the information the second thread is attempting to access, the program fails.
Since I have copied the music off on the hard drive, I am now even able to {alt}{tab} out and back without crashing the game or generating a DX error. I suspect that those who optimize their CD drives for multimedia preformance (no read ahead) will also not see any problem.
The only way to be sure of this is to forward this finding on to QS for comment.
After taking a break for over a month from playing the game, I decided to attempt a fix that I believed would have no effect on the DX problem of mine; but what the hey, I've already tried everything else. I took my music CD (Disk 2) and copied it to the hard drive. Low and behold, guess what happened? No more DX errors! Now before several of you throw rotten eggs at me and say "Heck, we already knew that!", no one I have seen to date has suggested this fix for the DX errors, but only to save wear and tear on your CD player.
Why it works (or at least my theory)!
I suspect the reason that this may be the ultimate solution to the majority of DX problems is due to the fact that most folks optimize their CD-ROM drives for data retrieval, thus enabling the read-ahead feature. Unfortunately, I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that QS checks for the CD when ever the user switches to a new window. Since the music is already playing (the first thread accessing the drive), this is a second thread attempting to access the same disk drive. This is not recomended as CD's are ment to be accessed sequentially (i.e. by one thread, thus enabling the drive to read ahead). Since the cached portion of the CD information does not include the information the second thread is attempting to access, the program fails.
Since I have copied the music off on the hard drive, I am now even able to {alt}{tab} out and back without crashing the game or generating a DX error. I suspect that those who optimize their CD drives for multimedia preformance (no read ahead) will also not see any problem.
The only way to be sure of this is to forward this finding on to QS for comment.
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