Sazerac's Help Desk (post your tech-related questions here!)

[Iced-Tee]

First my system
P3 800EB
i820 mobo
128 megs PC800RDRAM
Geforce256 64meg DDR
Win98SE
DirectX8.0

Now my problem.

My problem has two portions. Firstly, when I start the game and it displays that picture of the Goddess whatever her name is and all the characters around her in awe (at the start screen), the gamma flickers dark and bright (slightly) for a few seconds.

Portion two, my character doll images are outlined in white, which is very annoying looking and ruins the ambience.

I played this game up until December of last year and some how fell out of it. I am now looking to start a new game, because I am too out of it to continue my old game.

The game ran fine graphic wise before. I cant remember what drivers I was using, but I have the new 12.41 WHQL certified drivers now. I was using the straight up 12's to begin with, but then got the 12.41's after experiencing this glitch.

It worked fine yesterday for awhile, but today it is back to the same old tricks. I thought turning off FSAA had fixed it yesterday, which appeared to by the case. But it isn't solving the problem today.

Also note that I have downloaded the beta (beta patch...sheeesh, some good my time away from this game was), and unzipped it to the WW folder C/PROGRAMS/ACTIVISION/>WW<

Any ideas?

(note: I am inches away from falling out of the mood to play this game. In which case I will sell it and never support another sequel, including Wizards and Warriors 2 or Wizardry 8. This is pretty rediculous. I hope you can see where I am coming from)

[Wyvern]

NOTE:

I managed to solve ICED-TEE's problem in another thread - it was that nasty DirectX 8 .
Funny how some of us can run DirectX 8 without problems and so many others can't. The important thing is Iced-Tee is playing again!! YAY!!!!

Wyv

[Weissxx]

I loaded a game in the serpent temple when suddenly the automap resetet, but i didn't mind. When i had finished the temple i wanted to go back to a town and when i clicked on the town gate i suddenly received an error message
DEEP6: RecordPC PCPtr==0Error.
Has anyone ever had this problem before or does anyone know how to solve it?
i've got a intel celeron 300a processor that runs at 450 Mhz and 128 Mb SD Ram 100 Mhz than a Matrox G400 driver versio 4.11.01.1250
DirectX Version 8.0 (4.08.00.0400) and my harddisk has only 267 MB Free Space
i've read that this could be a problem, and there should be at least 300 MB but i allready tried to delete some files so that there is more free space but the
win386.swp grew bigger and bigger and i only have a 2 Gbyte Harddisk and i can't delete more files. I've installed the patch v1.00 and use Windows 98
4.10.2222

[Loumistro]

I downloaded this Thing for the Game a trainer and it doesn't Work at all is there Something wrong with my game or Computer

[Lady Avalon]

Hi Saz, I am installing W&W on a friend's computer. It's a Compaq 400MHz, MMX Intel Pentium, 128MB RAM, Windows ME, DirectX 8.0, 3dfx Voodoo 3. There is plenty of space, so that's not a problem.

The game installs ok. However, when you go to create characters and you get to the spellbooks, this message appears at the bottom and it freezes so you can't do anything but restart.

Here's the message: HR Bad GWAVE2DINIT = 0x80070057

Thanks Saz.

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[WillowIX]

Hi all!! This thread was just what I needed!!! Having lots of problem at the moment...
1) First ran the game without the patch and then got several and different deep6 error messages, especially one about sound...
2) Now the game runs with the patch and now it freezes every now and then...
3) Sometimes I receive a black screen when starting the game.
4) Sometimes when loading the game it just returns me to Windows...

Here´s some stats from my computer...
PIIII 1500MHz, 512Mb Ram (800Mhz RAMBUS, the worst there is....), 35Gb Harddrive and Creative, both, Soundblaster LIVE! Platinum and 3D Blaster Geforce 3 64Mb... Running Win98 at the moment with DirectX 7.0a.

[Dragonrat]

this is really strange.. I'm at the part where I have tree surfed over to the Isle of Sands to look for some living seeds from the bad tree dudes.. first of all, I haven't seen any yet, and second of all, I run into all kinds of other monsters (centaurs, jungle lilies, etc.) and have no problem, but whenever I run into a group of sand crawlers, for some reason during the fight my game totally freezes up. This only happens with the sand crawlers, so I've tried running from them, but they end up trapping me cause I'm trying to find some tree things at the same time. Any suggestions?

[Sazerac]

Originally posted by Dragonrat: this is really strange.. I'm at the part where I have tree surfed over to the Isle of Sands to look for some living seeds from the bad tree dudes.. first of all, I haven't seen any yet, and second of all, I run into all kinds of other monsters (centaurs, jungle lilies, etc.) and have no problem, but whenever I run into a group of sand crawlers, for some reason during the fight my game totally freezes up. This only happens with the sand crawlers, so I've tried running from them, but they end up trapping me cause I'm trying to find some tree things at the same time. Any suggestions?

Two things:

1) Try this first. Run a full defrag on your hard drive. That can often cause games (other than just Wizards & Warriors, too!) to either freeze up or crash to the desktop. If you're a big-time gamer, you need to be defragging your hard drive about once a week on the average. If you've never run a defrag before, you can find it by clicking Start, then Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter.

2) You can also try increasing the size of your swap file (Windows Virtual Memory). A too-small swap file often causes crashing during games. W&W recommends a min swap file size of 300 MB. To set this, right-click on "My Computer" on the desktop, and choose "Properties." Click on the Performance tab, then click on the Virtual Memory button at the bottom. Click the little button that says "Let me manage my own virtual memory settings", and then type in "300" into the Minimum text box (for 300 MB...you can make it bigger if you wish, but make sure it's at least 300.) Click on OK, then OK again. Restart your computer after doing so.

Hope this helps!

-Sazerac

[axel]

Thanks to someone very helpful on Usenet (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg) named Ross who figured this out, I have finally found a solution to the mysterious "crash to desktop" bug in Wizards and Warriors that kept many of us from even leaving the first town and playing the game! Everytime I clicked on the gate to go outdoors, the game would bomb to the desktop either before showing the outdoors, or allowing me outside but only moving a couple steps.
And no I never had to re-format, re-install Windows, or remove DirectX 8!! Also, it has nothing to do with virtual memory, video card drivers, other applications in memory, or DirectX.

Unbelievably, the solution was installing the latest Intel Indeo
video and audio codecs. You can get them at
"www.ligos.com/indeo/downloads/form.shtm". You don't need to get the
source code or demos, just the codecs.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I actually left town and could move
around outside without an immediate crash to the desktop!! The
serpent creature outside started talking to me about Gareth and I
almost started jumping for joy that the infernal game was finally
working!!

The game looks nice, but I'm not picky about graphics since I still enjoy playing DOS VGA games. It works for me in all resolutions, hardware or software, all detail levels. And at 1024x768 Hardware, my interface buttons look the same as in other modes, not ugly and unreadable. I do find nighttime very dark though and I don't enjoy turning up the gamma or the brightness on my monitor. Maybe I'll play with the lights off.

I believe that a previous game I installed had overwritten the Indeo
codecs with its own. How I wish for the simple days of debugging DOS
games where all you had to deal with was config.sys and autoexec.bat.
Who could have guessed it was Indeo? After so many hours of
troubleshooting (thank god I decided to not go through the hassle of
reformatting and installing Windows again), the problem is fixed.

For those of you with the desktop crash or any other crash bugs in W&W, I heartily recommend installing the latest Indeo codecs! BTW, I run Windows Me with DirectX 8.0a and a Voodoo5 5500 AGP card.

Not that I'll get around to playing the game anytime soon (couple years at least) because I have too many RPGs to work through first. I'm playing the old DOS RPG Star Trail at the moment, for which I just solved a side quest yesterday after several days of being baffled (the Gashok quest). But I'm so *ecstatic* that W&W finally runs on my computer!

Ritesh

[jsalsb]

Crashes during Kerrah Cet confrontation:

On every playthrough, my game crashes during the confrontation between Cet and Kerrah in the pyramid. This seems to be memory related. My system has 128 megs of ram, but this seems to be insufficient.

Solution (without installing additional ram):

Before playing this stage of the game, ctrl-alt-del on your desktop; in task manager, "End Task" as many of the Windows tsr's as posible (things like sleepmngr, quickfind, instantaccess, etc. - do not end Explorer or Rundll!).
This frees up enough ram for the game to continue.

One other tip: The more that's going on during the confrontation, the more memory is used. During Cet's and Kerrah's speech, back away and stay partially hidden behind a pillar, just peeping out to see the action. When Kerrah attacks, duck behind the pillar to avoid damage. This minimizes the amount of detail the game has to generate. After her attack, wade in and strike. If you have Haste cast, you should hit her enough times to spawn her plea for holy water before she attacks you again.

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JonII

[This message has been edited by jsalsb (edited 08-13-2001).]