Desktop Crash FINALLY fixed!!!!

[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

[Wyvern]

Congrats axel!!!!!!

Delighted to hear that you've solved your problem and have finally gotten "into" the game!!! YAY!!!!

You might consider crossposting your solution to the the Best Tips and Saz' techie help desk threads!

Wyv

[Sazerac]

Way to go Axel!!

Yes, do please put this in the "Best Tips" thread...also in the Help Desk thread. It will save some people a LOT of time and trouble.

Thanks!

-Sazerac

[Sazerac]

Just for the record, here's the link made interactive:

http://www.ligos.com/indeo/downloads/form.shtm

Thanks again,
Sazerac

[axel]

Additional technical reasons for this weird crash, courtesy of the helpful guy on Usenet:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
btw. it's not obvious who's to blame for the Wizard & Warriors crash.
It's caused because the dynamically loaded old Indeo DLLs reset the
floating point state, causing floating point exceptions like divide by
zero errors not to be ignored. Since this is general problem, any
dynamically loaded DLL can do this, and one that the DirectX
documentation specifically warns about, you could blame Heuristic Park
for not taking steps to protect W&W from this behaviour. You could
blame Microsoft for the C runtime library initialization code that
resets the floating point state automatically. You could blame Intel
for not taking the necessary steps from preventing the Microsoft C
runtime initialization code from running automatically when the Indeo
DLLs are loaded. Finally you could blame Microsoft again for a
fundamentally flawed DLL system that allows this kind of thing to
happen.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

[alz]

Yeah, the initial versions of the town videos used INDEO. I think the ones in there now are Blink/Rad (??) Maybe it's also a matter of not cleaning up the change over.

alz