[comp.sys.amiga.games] Problems with Countdown to Doomsday...

scroll@reef.cis.ufl.edu (Steve Croll) (01/02/91)

Has anyone had any luck in keeping "Buck Rogers - Countdown to Doomsday"
from crashing on an Amiga 3000?  Sometimes I can play for a couple hours
between crashes but normally it crashes every 10 minutes or so.  I have 
the program installed on my harddrive and have tried all sorts of things
to try to get it to work reliably.  I have tried running under 1.3 & 2.0
and that seems to have no effect.  I have tried the game with both caches
turned off (and also both on) -- no effect.  I have tried setting the stack
to large numbers (80,000 bytes) -- no effect. 

Sometimes when I start the game, it comes up with an insert disk "Buck2"
requester that I cannot get to go away.  I have tried assigning Buck2 to 
the directory on the harddrive but that has no effect.  When this happens,
I must reboot the machine (as the game hangs waiting for the requester to 
be satisfied).  What is really weird is if I start the game from (say) the
Workbench and I get the requester, I must reboot and start the game from the
CLI or I again get the requester.  This works both ways (start the game from
the CLI, get the requester, reboot, MUST start the game from the Workbench 
or I get the requester).

When the game crashes, the machine freezes.  If I wait a long enough or 
if I reboot (CTRL-Amiga-Amiga) I get a memory freed twice error (81000009).
I have gotten some weird results running the Enforcer.  It seems the program
likes to do longword reads of location $6 (!) and likes to read bytes at 
location $155.  It does these so often that I have not run the Enforcer
for more than a few "game moves" (the game moves unbearably slow with all 
the Enforcer hits).

I have tried calling the tech. support number.  They said they did extensive
testing (but only on an Amiga 500 & 2000).  The guy said he knew of no
problems and the only thing he could suggest is to send the disks back and
they would replace them with a new ones.  I guess I will try this, but
with "no known problems" I doubt they have a fix.  

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Steve Croll (internet: scroll@reef.cis.ufl.edu  home: 904-373-8389)