Fallout 2 freezes character screen after 15 seconds

L

lp618em

First time out of the vault
Fallout 2, patched version

P4 3g
Win XP(Damn you Bill Gates)
ATI Radeon 512mb
3x512 stick of ram

Was able to install regularly by setting up autorun to win98.

I have finally gathered the courage to post.

Fist thank you guys for keeping this site running as the sticky has been a help. But I seem to have a problem that I cannot find after 2 hours of searching.

Game installed great. I set my hardware accelarator down a couple notches so all the movies work.

Problem: The first time I tried to create my character, after about 15-20 seconds the whole system crashes. No alt-tab, no ctrl-alt-del. Only restarting the system works. SO I decided to use the first preade character. Game starts up and runs good. I take a look at the character screen to see what he has and BAM. System lock again. SO I restart and use premade character again and play for about an hour without using the character screen and everything works. I dare to look at the character screen, after 15-20 seconds it freeezes again.

Please help this miserable noob. Thank you.
 
First, try some of the more obvious yet not so obvious fixes for when it locks, like hitting the spacebar to see if it's stuck on an error message. If nothing with that, it might need to have a protective wrapper between it and the system layer.

I would suggest that you try a utility called "Advanced Game Loader", it seems to have a decent ability to catch some crashes before they hit the system. Try putting it into Windows 95 Compatibility as well.

Also, in case you haven't found it, and it might not be entirely that obvious with this problem, disable Dr. Watson, there's a few sites out there on how to do this, and believe me it helps system stability more than it helps find and report bugs. You can't easily report bugs when your system is hard-locked with the CPU limping around in a circle going "Dur....dur....dur...it hurt!"

:lightning:
 
I tried hitting space bar and other keys and nothing. Advanced Game Loader, still froze on the character screen. I had already disabled Dr. Watson per FAQ.
 
Gravedigg :P

I'm getting the same problem:

the game freezes and locks my pc on A) after a certain amount of time spent on the character creation screen (like 45 seconds to a minute or so), or B) if i hurry my ass up on the character creation screen and avoid A, the game freezes and locks my pc in-game, if i go to the character stats screen for a few seconds...

It happens on both an unpatched 1.00 fresh install and after patching to 1.02. Running it on Vista.

It's been about a year or so since i last played the game and i'm running it on the same pc in which i have played it about half a dozen times before, only now, i get this problem. :x

The most puzzling part about it is that the rest of the game seems to run fine except in the two instances above. I've tried several un/re-installing but no luck...

I would greatly appreciate any help with this. Thanks.
 
That's a really deep grave you just dug there.
But in answer to your question:
x'il said:
Running it on Vista.
Click to expand...
That's probably it.

Also, you might want to try Killap's Restoration and Bug Fix Patch, you don't want to be playing on Vanilla 1.00 or 1.02.
Also, is it Retail Original, Downloaded, Fallout Trilogy or something else? If it's a disc-based install it might be buggy and the disc might be scratched, you might want to get yourself a new copy (preferably trilogy, as it comes with the Killap patches too).
 
Reconite said:
But in answer to your question:
x'il said:
Running it on Vista.
Click to expand...
That's probably it.
Click to expand...

Thing is, what has changed? is it something fixable?, like i said, i've never encountered this problem before in about 5 or 6 playthroughs on the same machine with vista...

Reconite said:
Also, you might want to try Killap's Restoration and Bug Fix Patch, you don't want to be playing on Vanilla 1.00 or 1.02.
Click to expand...

No, i don't (want to be playing vanilla), played it one too many times already :P But i need to be able to run the vanilla versions without such a crappy problem for the purpose of mod-testing and mod-playing. I checked the list of bug fixes in the latest killap's patch and this issue is not mentioned anywhere. It's beginning to look like i won the crap-bad-luck lottery on this one, because after much searching i could only find this one person on this very topic mentioning the same problem about 3 years ago or something (and it seems he never got an answer) :x

Also, no, none of those new versions, and it can't be scratched/damaged cd either.
 
I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with Vista since myself and lots of other people can play it just fine, plus the dude who also had that problem earlier was on XP.

I would first try to do a manual install to make sure nothing got screwed up there.
Second, I would try to shut down as many things running in the background as possible.
And third, well I wouldn't have a clue. :)
 
[FO2] 5 seconds of gameplay followed by a system freeze

I'm suffering from this same problem, with just some minor differences.
I was going to start a new thread because I thought I was the only one suffering from this, but searching for "freezes" instead of just "freeze" showed me this thread.



I have the UK version of FO2.
I have followed the humongous installation steps described here with the difference that I also had to add the line cdlock=d:\cdlock.dat to fallout2.cfg otherwise it would complain about the CD missing in the drive.
After installing, I applied the offical UK patch listed in the NMA download section, version 1.02e.

I can run the game, I see the videos, I can go to the Options menu to tweak things and I can hear the music.
After I create a new game, I can "browse" the character selection, *but* if I click Modify or Create Character I have about 5 seconds until the mouse stops moving and the music starts stuttering, then after 20s of stuttering no more music plays. The system freezes, not even ctrl-alt-del works. After a while longer (maybe 5 minutes) windows automatically reboots, and freezes during it. I have to force another reboot.
The exact same thing happens if I select a pre-made character and start the game. I get about 5 seconds of gameplay in the entrance to the Temple of Trials.

I'm unable to try it using win95 or win98 compatibility mode because it complains about the CD missing (even though it's not missing... hurray for DRM).
Changing the graphical hardware acceleration also didn't solve it (in the menu from right clicking on desktop, selecting properties, selecting settings, clicking the advanced button, then selecting the troubleshooting tab).
I have also tried disabling the sound Hardware acceleration in dxdiag and rebooting, but it still didn't solve the problem.

Now for the best part (I guess I should say unfortunate instead), the exact same thing happens if I install killapp's unoffical patch (by doing from scratch: humongous install + killapp's patch). And it still happens if I install the hi-res patch on top of it.

I use linux, so my system for running the game is a vmware virtual machine with windows xp SP2 with 512 RAM. The virtual sound device is a Creative Sound Blaster PCI and the virtual graphic card is a VMware SVGA II.
I am able to run other games in that same virtual machine, namely TOEE.
I have the latest directX 9.0c that was updated with dxwebsetup.exe (I can see d3dx9_42.dll in system32).

Thanks in advance for any help.
I have a bag with a couple of hundreds bottle caps here, if you have a solution for this problem, it is yours ;)



EDIT:
mmm.... we are getting different time windows here (OP 15 seconds, x'il 45 seconds, and me 5), maybe the problem is due to the CPU type/frequency?
Does FO2 have an hard-coded dependency to the CPU?
I have a Core 2 6420 @ 2.14GHz.
 
Have you tried copy/pasting the files from your VM or Windows Humongous Install into Linux? WINE runs FO perfectly and it may avoid this problem.
 
I have never been a great fan of Wine. At first it was mostly due to bad timing which led to logistic problems (lack of inodes IIRC when I needed to install support libs for certain software), but then it also because it didn't work with the very few programs that I needed to run in windows.
Another reason was to be able to have things confined (eg, if I got a virus/trojan, it would never be able to access my / dir).
But if everything fails... I'll try it as the last resort for Fallout2 :|

Meanwhile I tried some other things, namely testing new sound drivers in the XP SP2 VM. By default it uses version 5.1.x, then I used automatic update for 5.2.x and I also tried installing some I found on the web which were version 5.12.x.... nothing solved that problem.

Right now I'm trying a Win 98 SE VM, but suffices to say VMware support for Win98SE is quite sucky. No shared folders and finding a driver for the audio card was a PITA!!!! I don't understand why vmware didn't provide one with vmware tools :x
I was able to start the game, but the cursor didn't move. So I went to remove the vmware mouse driver, but also had to delete the .vxd files to prevent auto-install... so now the system doesn't boot... :clap: :evil: (I think I have to edit some windows ini file).

I'll have to search the forum for info on windows 98 SE with vmware, maybe I'll get lucky. Will post my findings here latter.



EDIT:

greatsuccess.jpg :clap: :clap: :clap:

I was able to get FO2 running in vmware with XP SP3.
Just remember to disable 3D acceleration and to install VMware tools.

There is just a small problem, the system crashes with a black screen when I click Exit.
 
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