Worked fine, then started crashing.

[gperec]

Recently purchased OOTP4 for my Athlon500Mhz, 8G HDD (1.5G left), 128 Mb RAM PC. Everything works fine, I load up a current season I downloaded (don't remember where from, but bear with me a sec.) and it works fine. I play as the Cubs in career mode, make some trades, play about three weeks of the season (this is over the course of several days in real time). Then, while simulating a day, my system freezes up. I manually restart, and let scandisk do a scan at startup. Now, however, OOTP4 immediately crashes back to the desktop after launching (I see the main screen with the "loading season" dialog with a full load bar before it sends me back to the desktop). So, I disable fullscreen and Direct3D, and I get an "illegal operation..." message (details show that it was caused by an invalid page fault at...). I'm pretty bewildered. I have Dx 8.0, should I try 8.1, or is it something else? Hmm, while writing this I just tried switching out the league file for the original one that came with OOTP4. Now I can get in and every thing works. Should I just chalk that up to experience and get a new file? Also, do you have any advice for me regarding which files are the best (safest) to use with OOTP4 (I refer to 2002 season files).

Thanks alot, you guys make a great game!

Ethan

[Killebrew]

If by "new file" you mean roster file I'm not sure there is a lot of choices - there is 1 modern roster file, some historic files, and then the games default and fictional rosters. It sounds like there were some missing or corrupted files in the 1st league that gave you the problems. The roster was probably fine at the start though, and become corrupt from the system crash (not uncommon). Use any roster file you want, but to avoid future system crashes try to make sure background programs are not running. Also, if using a large roster file like Rolens try to avoid using the fill minors button and/or large drafts. This can have a drastic effect on sim speed and system resource requirements and result in crashes if your system is not powerful enough or you have conflicting apps running in the background. Good luck & hope this is helpful.