Escape/resume Pseudo-crash In Win2k

kavasa

So I just switched out my venerable gigabyte bx6 board and p2-400 for a biostar and an athlon 1.1. This is good, my framerate no long drops to like 2 on ns_caged, for example. I also traded up from win98 to win2k, because really. Win98 is pretty awful.

Anyways.

I can no longer hit "escape" and do things in the menus in-game. Or rather, I can, but when I hit "resume," bad things happen. I get a big black rectangle in the upper right hand corner of my screen and the desktop shows around that. Everything is all freaky bright, presumably as a reflection of my in-game gamma correction not being turned off. Half Life disappears from the task list, but hl.exe is still listed amongst the active processes. If I kill that process, my desktop returns to its normal resolution of 1152x864, whereas it was stuck at 800x600 before I killed it. The desktop, however, remains gamma-corrected until I reboot.

I can take a screeny of the crashed-and-stuck-at-resolution if someone so requests. There are unfortunately no handy error messages.

I've got an inoperable thingy in device manager. I'm pretty sure it's the onboard ac'97 audio controller, which I haven't bothered to fix because I prefer my sb live, really, and it just doesn't seem to want to use the drivers that came on the motherboard's cd OR off biostar's website.

AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.1, not overclocked (the PCI bus drops a brick if I try to pump the FSB, since the two buses are not asynchronous)
Biostar M7VKD
256 mb pc100 RAM
Powered by ATI Radeon 7000 (aka Radeon VE) 32mb
win2k sp3 all qchained and whatnot

As a quick note... I didn't actually install HL, <i>per se</i>. I also got a new 40gb ATA100 hard drive because I figure my 8gb ATA33 beast is due to die pretty soon, and it's also really slow. But, I also didn't want to bork about with downloading the most recent patch because Sierra forces you to go through fileplanet or their <b>unbelievably awful</b> auto-updater to do so. So I just installed HL as per normal and copied my half life directory from the old hard drive to the new one.

It seems to work. But it's wacky. So who knows?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->

-K

InfraRed

Two things come to mind, firstly what is the resolution of the desktop that u have it set ALL the time, and what resolution do u run the game in? Having the game in a higher reso than the desktop is asking for trouble. Secondly, about the noboard thingy go disable it in the BIOS there really is no point in having the onboard sound enabled when u are using a PCI soundcard as again, thats just asking for trouble. When disabled u wont see it in the Device Manager else theres something wrong. I was going to say that the bit about NS being in a rectangle etc happens a lot with 2k and XP WITH Nvidia cards... but seeing u have ATI I dont know if it happens there as well. I run NS in a window 1024 reso whereas my desktop is 1280 and so I get the very high gamma of the desktop whereas the game window is fine. Also when closing hl.exe the gamma remains the same until a restart.

kavasa

Oh right! Disable the onboard sound in the BIOS. Dunno if that will help, but it'll at least make device manager neat and tidy. I run NS at 600x600 and my desktop at 1152x864. I can at least quit out of NS without having to restart to fix my desktop's gamma, but it really would be nice to, say, occasionally hit escape and not have to quite out of the server and then rejoin. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->

Thanks for the suggestions!

-K