Repeatable Crash with Video
 

I can reproduce this crash (reboots the computer automatically) at will now and unfortunately, it is a big enough crash that it has rendered the game unplayable for me. I get this crash when I do this:

New Game => Check MAL in "Select Standard Leagues" => Give a name to my game: "Majors" or "Major Leagues" or something else. => Click "Start Game", this gets me the Create Manager screen. I change my nationality to "Indian" and Year of Birth to 1980. => Hit "OK".

When it gets to Creating Logos and it reaches 52%, it crashes, resulting in the computer rebooting automatically. It is happening everytime. Below is a video of this crash in case it helps you to diagnose the problem.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...41855764417727

The video is about 3 minutes long and a bit shaky as I am trying to film with my left hand and create the league with the right.


One time, it gave me a BSOD (in WinXP SP2, no less), which I am attaching as a pic, in case that might help.

I would love to play this game but I can't due to the crashes...

Some info on my system:

I am running Windows XP SP2 on an AMD Athlon 1800+ w/ 1 GB RAM. I have been able to reproduce this crash with my anti-virus software activated and while it was disabled. No other major programs were running at the time except for programs minimized in the System Tray: Skype, Yahoo IM, and Firewall.

Sounds like either file corruption or a dying HDD.

Try uninstalling/reinstalling the game and see if it helps. Make sure to completely delete the folder before reinstalling.

Well, a bad IDE controller or motherboard is possible, too, given the fact that error+auto-reboot was the symptom when my PC died. Of course, that was on everything, and not just one function of one app.

No change of a bad IDE controller or MB as this crash happens only with OOTP 2006. I can play plenty of other games (OOTP 6.5, PureSim 2007, Brian Lara Cricket 2005, Civ 4, MVP Baseball 2005) and have experience no such problems.

OK, so I will try this next . . .and report back as I have similar specs and a patch applied. You'll have to be a bit patient, as the test season being run right now is massive.

Edit:
At least you don't ask for 64 teams with 5 sets of minors .:cool:

I was able to create a manager in a MAL league born in 1980 using a patch candidate.

Any news on this install?

Terrible... Before I applied the patch, I uninstalled the game, and reinstalled it to make sure there would be no corrupted files. Once the patch was applied, I tried to create a new league and when it got to "Creating Logos - 52%", the computer rebooted. The league had been saved by this time though so I was able to load once the computer started back up. Turns out that it had calculated my age wrong, see pic below.

Then, I tried to create a Historical league by clicking on "Add a Historical Major League". It sees the Lahman DB correctly, loads it correctly too. Then, the moment it tries to import players, it crashes. I have tried all evening and everytime, its the same thing.

I am extremely frustrated as my time has been totally wasted...

I also tried to create MAL and Historical leagues with all non-essential programs shut down (i.e., I only had a Network Connection icon in the Systray active, no other program except OOTP 2006. I even shutdown firewall and anti-virus).

I'll make an ankit2 league and attempt again to duplicate.

I am running this on an AMD-based PC, could that be a problem?

Could be . . .please post some basic system specs

I had a similar problem as you have with just one game, MVP Baseball 2005. I could not save my profile! Every other game played fine, just MVP. Finally I found the problem. After running chkdsk I had some bad sectors. After using PartitionMagic and some trickery, I got around them and reinstalled MVP. Works flawless now. Apparently that part of the game was at the bad sectors part.

LarryP.

See post #2 above. Let me know if you need more info.

Having a very hard time duplicating error. . .

That was an obvious mistake on my part. That's what I was driving at.

Going to have to ask for more eyeballs.

I have asked for additional resources on this issue.

Installed the game on my laptop (Intel Pentium IV, 2.4 GHz, 512 MB RAM, ATI Mobility M6 Video Chip, WinXP SP2). Creating a historical league and as well as an MAL standard league worked like a charm... Same programs running in the background as I have on my desktop. Also, did the ChkDsk thing on my Desktop and had no hard drive errors.

Thinking it may be an AMD vs. Intel CPU issue...

#1 good to hear plan B is working. when possible, give your views on game

#2 the CPU is a good operating hypothesis

Sleep now, hopefully others will chime in soon.

According to Bill Gates:

CAUSE
This behavior may occur if one of the following conditions is true:

• One or more of the random access memory (RAM) modules that are installed on your computer are faulty.
• The RAM configuration is incompatible with Windows XP.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315335

I'll try it out on an AMD today too but I would urge you to check out your PC with a defrag, scandisk etc

In my experience, quite often issues like this have highlighted a problem with your system setup. Other games sometimes don't crash because they do not do some of the intensive stuff that our games do

Personally, I would favor the bad sector theory. If the sector(s) going bad are only in the area where OOTP is being installed to, it wouldn't affect any other program. Perhaps in time, if you removed OOTP and installed some other programs, they would also fail, but unless that happens, the only way to know for sure is scan your hard disk for bad sectors.

If the problem were AMD related I would expect a lot more people to be having similar problems. I have an AMD system and have setup some HUGE test leagues with no crash problems at all.

Sometimes chkdsk won't find a problem even though a sector may be going bad, but it's worth trying anyhow. You may want to try out some third party chkdsk type program. Even something free like Western Digitals diagnostic utility. Maybe you've already done this?

Thanks for the suggestion, but that is not an issue. RAM modules check out fine and the configuration is compatible with XP.

CHKDSK Stinks!
 

I agree. I replied earlier about the bad sectors. CHKDSK for the most part is a piece of junk. It can find problems but seldom fixes them. Cross linked files under NTFS is no problem but bad sectors baffle it. A program can install right over bad sectors and cause all kinds of mind boggling problems. I found this out a few weeks ago and just about lost my mind trying to find out what the problem was. A very good 3rd party utility (but costs $89) is Spinrite, and it will check any disk drive and fix any problem. I used it on my PC and their support is online and immediate. I mean, I wrote them and within minutes I had replies and this went on for several days. We got it fixed too. It can be found at:

http://www.grc.com/sroverview.htm

They also have a wonderful forum of people ready and willing to help. It can be found here:

http://www.grc.com/discussions.htm

LarryP.

Some interesting stuff: I began a Quickstart MAL league and it worked perfectly. I simmed a two months and everything is running fine. This leads to me believe that it is not related to HD errors or system setup. Also, the errors happen at exactly the same spot: In adding historical leagues, it happens after the game is done loading the Lahman DB, and tried to import players. In creating a Standard MAL league, it happens when it is Creating Logos and is 52% of the way through. 56% comes up for a fraction of a second before the Windows crash dialog box appears.

What do we do now?

Pardon, but for the sake of clarity, is this quickstart that you ran perfectly is on the PC that is giving you all the trouble?

Yes, the Quickstart is on the Desktop PC which has the AMD chip and where my crashes are occuring.

I went ahead and followed the scenario Ankit described in the first post and I was able to successfully create the new league. No crash. I'm runnng an Intel Pentium 4, 3.20Ghz.

I ran disk defragmenter on my system and it has 22% fragmentation and it recommends I run the defragger. But is it possible your fragmentation is significantly more and the system is having problems find usable disk space at times?

I have 4% Disk defragmentation. As far as disk space is concerned, I have 35 gigs free on a 80 gig HD.

I have checked the "usual suspects" that are causes of an error and have come up empty.

Any update on this? Is this being looked into or am I just out of luck?

It is being looked at. At this second you are out of luck. I am trying to get this problem identified/isolated/solved.

Next suggestions would involve:

removing the application
cleaning the registry of all SI references
rebooting
redownloading
reinstallation
testing

May I ask how the registry can be interferring with importing Lahman DB players and Creating Logos? My quickstarts are running fine, started a Quickstart MAL league last league and set it autoplay for 50 years. 20 years have been simmed and no crash. I don't want to be simply trying things to see if I get lucky.

Also, how would I know how many and which registry entries refer to SI? Am I searching for "SI" only? What about "OOTP Baseball 2006" or some other ones?

OOTP Baseball 2006 to be specific, for the registry. As it is not malfunctioning with a quickstart, don't try that yet.

What happens if you try a different DB, like Arod23/Garlon in lieu of Lahman?

I have the latest Arod23/Garlon and I get the same error at the same time (Importing Players, after it has completed loading the DB). I also tried loading the DB from different locations (C:\Lahman, C:\Games\OOTP 2006\Lahman, D:\Lahman, C:\Arod, D:\Arod).

That likely isolates it from being the DB.

It might be a good idea to send you a successfully imported league from same year.

True, but then the problem of crashing in creating non-historical leagues still remains (Creating Logos - 52%). Regardless, you don't need to send a save game over, I can import a historical league on my laptop (Intel-based) and move it over to the desktop to see if it loads. I am 99.5% sure it will load, its the creation of leagues that is the problems.

Are logos being created from within the OOTP2006.EXE or is that job being sent to a different file. Could the same DLL be used by both the creation of logos and the importing of players, which is likely calculating ratings and is why is crashing. Just some thoughts...

Interesting theory. I'll paste more notes into TT.

Another update: I created a historical league on my laptop, saved it without simming a game, and moved it to my desktop to see how things would go. Amazingly, I simmed 2 seasons and it imported rookies perfectly when it was time to do so. So the problems rears it ugly head only during League Creation.

On a side note, one bug that has been already reported showed up: the Age of the Human Manager being changed after the Manager is created. I set my Year of Birth in the 1920 Historical League to 1894, where as it ended up being 1808 once the League loaded.

This point was added to to the TT case for Markus.

If he ever gets over the German victory over Costa Rica . . .

Just FYI, this is TT #1811, and I'm moving it over to the Logged Issues forum. Unfortunately, no update here right now.
:(

Steve

Sorry, but there is absolutely no way for me to duplicate this and find a problem in the code (if there is one)... it really sounds like there is something wrong with the system. :(

I've had experiences like this in the past.

Once, we even paid for someone to bring in their system to SI Towers and we installed some debug tools.

Using that experience, everytime it came down to something on the users machine. Once it was a new HD, another it was that they'd just installed some new memory chips.

Many other games or applications will run fine on the machine but games like OOTP push the system to the limit and suck every last bit of memory and resource (especially pre patch2).

Markus, thanks for giving me an update on this.

Marc, I understand your point. In light of this, can I get a refund on the game as this problem is not something that is fixable?

I'm afraid not.

This is not a game issue as far as we are aware, it's down to your system.