Civ3 crashes after entering industrial age

[tuffguy]

I've read some advice about this phenomenon, and can say that:

* I'm running Windows 98
* Civ3 vanilla 1.29f
* I'm not using a save file from a previous patch version of civ3
* I have made sure that the ".amb" sound files exists in Worker and Settler for the corresponding ".ini" files for the Industrial Age.

The last item got me past the splash screen. Now the game crashes randomly a turn or two later during my portion of the turn (I have "wait after my turn" on). The last time, it was after my units auto-moved (on their multi-turn instruction) and a couple of actions later, I right-clicked on a stack of my units --> core dump.

v1.29f
CIVILIZATION3 caused an invalid page fault in
module CIVILIZATION3.EXE at 017f:004e5f77.
Registers:
EAX=0187e060 CS=017f EIP=004e5f77 EFLGS=00010246
EBX=00625bc8 SS=0187 ESP=00adf7f8 EBP=0061a940
ECX=5199d980 DS=0187 ESI=005c581e FS=6bf7
EDX=6a023f24 ES=0187 EDI=00880b71 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
8b 14 d0 ff 62 08 c3 90 90 8a 81 c4 10 00 00 84
Stack dump:
004e2375 ffffffff 0061a940 00000300 00000000 08979660 00000009 00000291 00000000 00625bc8 00498e0f 00000000 02075890 020758be 00adf834 0207587e

Any help would be appreciated. BTW, where can I find the core file and what tool if any, can I use to look at it in Windows, like gdb for UNIX, and would that help?

Thanks!

 

[CommandoBob]

When I first got Civ3 Gold I tried to run it on a Win98 SE, 300 MHz, 128 MB RAM machine.

It would play for about an hour and then crash.

It needed at least a 400 MHz machine.

So my first question is, what are the specs on your machine.

I later got a 500 MHz machine and it ran Okay; later upped the RAM to 256. So it can be done. I was running vanilla (for a while), PTW and then Conquests.

 

[tuffguy]

Good suggestion there, hadn't thought of the machine's firepower having an influence. I'm using a 650 MHz Sony Vaio. It's pretty skimpy on memory, only 256k and the graphics controller is an Intel 82810 with 5.5MB. But I doubt that's my problem.

It might be one of those cases of using a save file from v1.09 in a v1.29 game, though if that were the case, you would expect a problem to show up right away, not 100's of turns later and suspiciously within a turn or two of the Industrial Age, no?

 

[CommandoBob]

I Googled for 'CIVILIZATION3.EXE at 017f:004e5f77' and only got one hit: this thread!

When I Googled for just 'CIVILIZATION3.EXE' I found some hits refering to an early version (in 2001) of a tool called 'Civ3MultiTool' that was causing the game to crash. I read a couple of pages on that thread at Apolyton but never same an explicit correction to that problem.

I also saw a very similar post to yours on Atari's website.

Uninstall/reinstall might do the trick.

Could spyware/malware/adware be clogging the CPU?