Black Screen/Lockups w/ 512 Meg RAM, but runs fine with 256

Tue Apr 22, 2003 5:30 am by Kalendraf

I've had Freelancer for a while, and it was running fine on my system. Last Friday I upgraded my system from 256 Megs of PC2700 to 512 Megs. Everything is working great...except Freelancer.

At first I thought maybe the new memory was bad. But after exhaustive testing w/ a variety of memory test programs and running a gamut of other software and games on the system, I can safely say that the memory is ROCK SOLID.

I've tried all the suggestions like updating or downgrading video drivers, defragging, trying lower graphics options and so forth and so on. I've seen just about every kind of badness that Freelancer can exhibit (Black Screen on launch, random freezes after getting started, crashes, etc), as I tweaked the version of the video drivers I was using. The most stable setting I've stumbled upon is running with the original video drivers, which lets me at least launch the game, but it freezes randomly within the first 30 seconds after launching into space.

Here's what I've found in debugging under the 512 Meg settings:
Newest video driver (Detonator or the Leadtek version): Black screen hang after starting game. Need to reboot system to recover.
Previous date video driver (Detonator): Seems to hang on resolution switching. Can't seem to run this driver properly on my card.
Previous date video driver (Leadtek): Hangs on Freelancer (w/ planets, stars) startup screen. Sounds starts, but mouse and keyboard are locked up. Same behavior happens w/ original driver if I try to start the game at 1280x960 video mode.
Original video driver (Leadtek): Able to start game, random lockup soon after launching into space.

If I drop back to 256 megs of RAM (using either memory stick) it runs fine! The problem is, I don't want to drop back to 256 megs as I have need of that extra memory for some scanning and graphics work I'm doing. After looking thru a variety of other horror stories, I've found that a lot of the people with similar configs encountering similar problems seem to also have 512 megs as well. This seems to be pointing at a driver or software bug of some kind, since all of our hardware shouldn't have the same identical bug.

FYI, here is my setup:
Athlon 1800+ XP
Soltek SL-75DRV5 Motherboard
2x Kingston 256 Meg PC2700 (KVR333X64C25/256)
Leadtek Ti4200 Video Card (w/ original drivers right now)
Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla (w/ the newest drivers)
ASUS 50x CD-Rom
Mitsumi CD-RW
Win98SE w/ up to date patches
DirectX 9.0a
1280x960 mode as default window size.
1024x768 as mode for Freelancer.
3d sound is off.

Edited by - Kalendraf on 22-04-2003 06:31:14

Edited by - Kalendraf on 22-04-2003 06:33:55

Wed Apr 23, 2003 1:42 am by thermalepoxy

i've had similar problems but i've alway used 256mb i think it's something 2 do with DX 9.0A after upgradeing i ran into lots of stuff i'll try downgradeing drivers i'm runnnung the 43.35 or something like that now i'll go for the 41.09s k lets you know thanks for the driver idea.
i just the a huge black screen when i run the program nothing else

Wed Apr 23, 2003 10:08 pm by DeEvil

I believe it has something to do with some version of these fllmod and the savegames you have on your computer.

copy them to another folder and try and launch the game again without any savegames.

Thu Apr 24, 2003 6:48 pm by Heltak

Just delete your save games and it runs ><! should've done the copy thing ><!

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Mon Apr 28, 2003 6:53 pm by Kalendraf

I've never run any mods, so I kind of doubt that my save games directory is the problem. When I can get the game started up, I can load the save games. The problems don't show up until I launch into space. Eventually it locks up, with the screen freezing, and mouse and keyboard going unresponsive. I am willing to try moving the save files to try it, but I will be surprised if this cures my problem.

Tue Apr 29, 2003 6:47 am by CagaLeche

Have you played with BIOS settings?
I recommend AGP APerature size og 64 or 128,
disabling video BIOS caching and system caching,
and you should also try playing with some memory timings.

Check out the BIOS optimization guide at this website, its pretty awesome.
Click here
Maybe something in here will work for you. Good luck!

Wed Apr 30, 2003 10:47 pm by Kalendraf

I tried a whole bunch of bios stuff under the memory timings. Quite a few of them make my system unstable, so I don't have a lot of room to fudge there. I have not tried changing the AGP aperture yet. I didn't consider that much of an issue. Currently it is set to 128 I think. I can try that, but with the luck I'm having, my Freelancer days may be behind me...

Also, after reading thru the boards, it sounds like a lot of people are finding the game is getting less stable recently. Some of that could be people trying mods, but I'm wondering if there is something else at work like a timestamp getting read in erroneously or the game accidentally using a date value where it shouldn't be and causing a glitch, etc. Could try changing the calendar under windows and see if it has any effect I guess.

Sun May 04, 2003 6:27 pm by Kalendraf

I'm finally running Freelancer again. I ended up changing 3 settings in the bios as well as moving all of my save files (except the most recent one) out of the save directory. I'm not sure which of these changes did the trick, but it's working again.

For those wondering, I dropped the AGP aperture from 128 to 64. With the 128 Meg Ti4200 card, I would have expected 128 would be the ideal value, but the BIOS tweaking site seemed to imply that either 64 or 128 was ok, so I changed it. I also changed a pair of settings under the memory. Went up to 4 bank interleave (was at no interleave by default), and then changed the DRAM burst length to 8 (was 4). I ran some benchmarks on didn't notice a huge improvement on the video or memory scores. But the most important benchmark for me (actually running Freelancer) was now working!

To all who replied previously - Thanks for the help.

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