Crashing to black screen

[Jarith]

I've had a similar issue in Civ4. Civ4Col will randomly crash to a black screen and the sound will hang. I am running the game on a Gateway P-6831FX Laptop. I have all the drivers up to date.


Gateway P-6831FX Specs

I have a lot of games on this laptop and this is the only one I'm having this issue with.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Zdawg88]

Yeah, I get the same thing too. Random Black Screen crashes. Kind of frustrating, and I'm not sure what to do.

 

[Shurdus]

I've had a similar issue in Civ4. Civ4Col will randomly crash to a black screen and the sound will hang. I am running the game on a Gateway P-6831FX Laptop. I have all the drivers up to date.


Gateway P-6831FX Specs

I have a lot of games on this laptop and this is the only one I'm having this issue with.

Thanks for any help.

I had the same issue with Civ4. I looked into it, but have not found a solution yet. I will look into it when I have Col and let you know what I can find.

Some questions for you. Does it occur often or - like with me - bery, very rarely? What are you doing when it occurs? Can you reproduce it, or does it seem like it happens at random?

With me it happened so rarely that I have bo clue what it can be. The more detailed info you can give me about when it occurs and what it is you are doing at the time, the closer we may get to a solution.

 

[Jarith]

It seems to happen at random. Most recently I had just loaded a game. I was in the city screen trading some goods to my ship. When it's turn ended the game went to center on a unit I had exploring and boom, black screen.

 

[Felix Luce]

SAME THING HERE!!! Oh my god!! At different times, I will move a character normally and BOOM, it goes to black screen with just the cursur showing, music still playing. When I ctrl-atl-dlt end the game and try to start it up again, it freezes too! So I have to shut down the computer, turn it on, and start the game up again, only to have it crash randomly 10 minutes later.

 

[Shurdus]

SAME THING HERE!!! Oh my god!! At different times, I will move a character normally and BOOM, it goes to black screen with just the cursur showing, music still playing. When I ctrl-atl-dlt end the game and try to start it up again, it freezes too! So I have to shut down the computer, turn it on, and start the game up again, only to have it crash randomly 10 minutes later.

Hmmm, so it happens after 10 minutes into the game, any game, and any action may trigger it?

The way you describe it I suspect that you may have a driver issue with some driver that may or may not be entirely relevant to the game itself. I myself had once a bad internet driver on my computer, all it did was crashing the game. It wasn't even needed for internet too, all the driver did was causing random crashes. You may want to take a look at your installed software. Take a look at your motherboard drivers and google them. See if more people experienmce your kind of problems. More often than not fixes are readily available.

 

[Felix Luce]

Thanks a lot for the tips! Yeah, I'm gonna first exchange the game for another copy to see if it has to do with the disc itself--if it still crashes, then I'll check out the graphics card/other hardware. My dad bought a used Dell cos we all have Mac laptops, and I'm the only person who uses a desktop (and then it's only for gaming, which I do rarely). I've heard Dells just die after four years, no matter what, so it might be just a cheap computer.

 

[Zdawg88]

I think I've fixed my problem with the crashes. I already had up to date drivers, etc., but I found if I lowered my Core bus clock frequencies by 200 or so mhz on my video card GPU it seemed to remove the issue. Not sure why this is, but it works.

 

[Shurdus]

I think I've fixed my problem with the crashes. I already had up to date drivers, etc., but I found if I lowered my Core bus clock frequencies by 200 or so mhz on my video card GPU it seemed to remove the issue. Not sure why this is, but it works.

Àh... The front side bus on your processor determines how fast your CPU can communicate with the rest of your system. With high end cards or memory, the timing of the front side bus can become a little too tight, causing errors that just should not happen. Sometimes your system will even be just too fast for your processor, and random crashes like these occur.

It never even occured to me, but this might indeed be the solution. Thnx man!

 

[hopless3]

When I'm playing the game at random intivals the PC just black screens. At this point there is nothing that can be done the pc is completly unresponsive, I have to power off.

My first thought was to update the drivers but that has not helped (most were the latest ver).

I haven't got an overclocked system or even one that was using components that are likely to be overclocked everything runs as the manufacturer intended so I doubt that would be a usefull change.

Colonization is the only programe that crashes. It will be running normally and then i just have a black screen. The monitor enters sleep mode because it is no longer getting a signal.

 

[viator]

Exactly the same problem, but (in my case) there is more...
Maybe there is a connection with the thread "Visual C++ Runtime error on start up".

Copy of my lat message there:

Halfway the game there was a blackout and the game was gone...
Not silly anymore but quite annoying.

Noteworthy may be that the same blackout-thing also occurs sometimes with SimCity4 that I recently bought for old time sake. So maybe all this fun is caused by Vista or the videocard or ... but not by Civ or Sim?

I play under Vista Ultimate (32bit) on Dual Core E6600, 4Gb SDRAM (c6400), XFX-Geforce8800GTS.

 

[pajeg]

i got rid of this by lowering the size of the textures

you'll probably have to lower some others options, did'nt put everything back to normal after i could finally load this damn save

 

[sigma relief]

Has anyone had this problem when ending the turn? I have a save that crashes at the end of year 1702 regardless of what is done in the turns leading up to the crash. This problem also poped up circa 1670, but loading earlier saves and changing my routine helped for the 5 turns it crashed on me. As soon as the end turn button is clicked, I get the same black screen described here along with the Vista "This program has stoped responding"

The save has a moderately large population of 150, but runs prety well on a year old Core 2 duo with an Nvidia 7400. The graphics related fixes don't seem to have an affect on the crash.

What OS is everyone running and can anyone crash the game repeatedly on command?