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Author Topic: Brief lock up  (Read 4264 times)

Anonymous

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Brief lock up
« on: 2001-09-12 05:29:00 »
Ok, just so you tech heads won't blame my system, I'm playing FF VIII with a Pentium III 1Ghz, 384M of RAM, a TNT2 32M card, have the Sound Blaster Live X-Gamer 5.1 audio card, and a 46gig UTA 100 hard drive. Now on to my problem...

The game plays just fine except for when I run into a new scene (i.e. go from one room to another one). I can clearly see that the new "room" has loaded, but then the game will totally freeze for about half a second, my hard drive 'busy' light will come on, then the game continues on like nothing is wrong.

I've defragged my hard drive, and there's well over 19gigs of free space on it (so the windows swap file should have plenty of room). I've also re-installed the game a few times, and even gone so far as to format my drive and reload windows! I've also tried playing the game pre and post the v1.2 patch (and yes i chose the SqeaPatch one) and it still does this EVERY time. Does anyone know what might be causing this??

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanx,

Kess

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Skillster/RedSarg99

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Brief lock up
« Reply #1 on: 2001-09-12 13:12:00 »
god forbit it, AGAIN???
i think ill let some1 else solve this 1  :D
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Alhexx

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Brief lock up
« Reply #2 on: 2001-09-12 19:27:00 »
Hm, AFAIK my friend Yuki had the same problem - I've got to ask him.

- Alhexx

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Threesixty

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Brief lock up
« Reply #3 on: 2001-09-13 05:13:00 »
A whole half a second?.....

I don't see how that is a problem....try using one of the DLS Sound patches, and then you'll see what a real pause is.

1-4 seconds betweeen music changes, but the music sure does sound 200% better.  http://ffsf.cjb.net/" TARGET=_blank>http://ffsf.cjb.net/  

Try unloading any background programs....you know...Ctrl Alt Del, End task everything except Explorer and Systray. Set your virtual ram to 400megs (upper and lower)....smaller if you can manage it. You have a lot of ram, so you probably can go as low as 100megs. The less windows will rely on it. Download a program called Cacheman.
  http://www.outertech.com/" TARGET=_blank>http://www.outertech.com/  

I don't think FF8 was programed to hog systems. So even though you have a ultra100 and 1 gigs to play with. FF8 seem to still like loading it's stuff a piece at a time. Doing the above will force windows to use your ram instead of that annoying vram.

[This message has been edited by Threesixty (edited September 13, 2001).]

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Anonymous

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Brief lock up
« Reply #4 on: 2001-09-13 09:02:00 »
Well, I've reduced my virtual memory down to 100Mb, and I've installed the Cacheman program.  According to it, it says I'm using almost no virtual memory, and almost totaly physical memory.  

But alas, the half second freeze is still occuring.  The odd thing is, I have a friend of mine that has a system very similar to mine, and I've seen the game played on his without ANY problems.  It runs very smoothly from one scene to another without the temporary lock up.  

So perhaps it is my system, but I still can't figure out what is causing this abnormality.  Any other ideas guys??

Thanx again,

Kess

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Threesixty

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Brief lock up
« Reply #5 on: 2001-09-14 06:54:00 »
Is your friends HD as full as yours? The more stuff you have on a HD, the slower it gets. The outside spins a lot faster than the inside....and the outside fills up first.

Does your friend have a TNT2 card too? If he has something faster, that could be it....what drivers are you using? Is he using the same drivers. Are you sure that it's only in FF8.

It could be anything....A bad stick of ram.....not enough Powersupply...heat. When HDs get hot, they start stuttering. Honestly...half a second isn't too long between transitions.

What OS are you using.

Under Systems, Performance, File system, Harddrive...select Server instead of Desktop.

(Next time buy an Athlon  :P....)

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Anonymous

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Brief lock up
« Reply #6 on: 2001-09-21 16:55:00 »
Well, it's finally fixed!!

First let me thank all those who took the time to actually respond to this (not so tech minded) girl, lol.  It seems that my motherboard driver was the culpret (or lack of I should say).  

I have a relatively new motherboard that uses the Intel 815 chipset on it.  I installed the chipset drivers fine, however there is also an Intel UTA Storage Driver that is highly recomended to be installed with the motherboard.  Being that I tend not to install "extra" programs that I'm not fully aware of what they do, I never did install this one when I started using my new board.

Well, I have since installed the driver and now there's NO skip between scene transitions in the game!! =)  Furthermore, my system seems to be accessing data much faster than it did before.  A friend of mine told me that I should read a bit more carefully and be less apprehensive to installing programs when I get new hardware =P

Anywho, thanx again to all who responded.  And btw, FF VIII is an awesome game!!  =)

Take care all,

Kess

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