Freezing crashing bug!

[mwaawm]

Can anyone help me out with this very anoyning problem.

Gamebase keeps freezing and crashing on me for no apparent reason. I first noticed it in v2.4 where scrolling to the game H.E.R.O as well as some others in the list of games would lock the program up.

With v3.1 its gotten much worse initially I noticed that a few of the dungeon master games froze it, but now after redownloading and reinstalling all the files a number of times its gotten much worse with even games I know could be scrolled through fine previously now freezing the gamebase for some reason (battle of midway is one example that now freezes but worked the previous time i downloaded and installed v3.1)

Its not the games themselves as when I ran H.E.R.O. through steem seperatley it appears to work fine.

Ive been downloading the archives from the atomas site directly onto my laptop at home using my quite slow 512k broadband but in case this was the problem Ive also tried downloading the archives at work onto a 2gig microSD card and then transferring to my laptop at home, but as i said the problem seems to be getting worse instead of better...

When Ive verified the gamebase files Im missing 6games 0 music 6 screenshots and 835 extras, but it used to state there were missing files before as well but the freezing was never this bad. All my other software appears to work fine.

Anyone have any advice to fix this?

[megar]

Try to completely uninstall the gamebase frontend, delete the gamebase frontend folder (including the gbst v3.1d folder).

Re-download the frontend, install the frontend. Re-download a fresh GBST v3.1d, and unpack in your frontend folder. Then point all the paths to where you unpacked the "Gamebase ST v3.1d" folder (the huge one).

This will clear some buggy cache the frontend may have created. Be sure to always shut down Gamebase ST correctly before turning down your system.

[SkylineDave]

Try to completely uninstall the gamebase frontend, delete the gamebase frontend folder (including the gbst v3.1d folder).

Re-download the frontend, install the frontend. Re-download a fresh GBST v3.1d, and unpack in your frontend folder. Then point all the paths to where you unpacked the "Gamebase ST v3.1d" folder (the huge one).

This will clear some buggy cache the frontend may have created. Be sure to always shut down Gamebase ST correctly before turning down your system.

yeah i agree this should help. GBST does create some cache (one of them is called GBGame) which can sometimes cause a problem

[SkylineDave]

...duplicate post...

[mwaawm]

Ive once again completely uninstalled and reinstalled it, this time to be sure I deleted the old gamebase folder as well and when I reinstalled stipulated a different location for it to ensure it wasnt going to get mixed up with any old versions.

Matters have improved but only slightly, when I did a quick check 1943 the battle of midway for example no longer freezes gamebase but H.E.R.O. still does (In fact this particular game has cause gamebase to freeze on every single installation Ive done previously) havent tested the other games yet but I suspect the dungeonmaster mission disk to still have similar problems.

As an aside I havent actually set up the emulators as yet, I was just using gamebas to view each game and its screenshots, then If I fancied playing I was loading up the game in steem seperately. Judging by the problems I get trying to get the gamebase itself to run I kinda decided discretion was the better part of valour and decided to forego setting the emulators up to run within it. Could this be a possible cause for all my difficulties with GamebaseST?

[SkylineDave]

not setting up the emulators shouldnt make any difference as all that does is tell GBST which emulator to call when you double-click on the game.
when GBST freezes, is it before or after the screenshots for that game appear? another idea - some games (like Elite and Goldrunner [i wonder why? ]) play a sound when you scroll over them as they are 'significant' games. go to your Tools menu and make sure 'play sound on classic game' is unchecked.

[mwaawm]

It occurs before the screenshots appear,

the sound thing I had noticed but its very few games that have this tag on them and I dont think Ive had any of those freeze on me, I had another quick check last night and 20,000 leagues under the sea froze on me and it never used to on previous installs.

The freezing games seem to be quite arbitrary other than the H.E.R.O. and Dungeon Master ones, or maybe I remember those because they were the first ones I tried that caused this bug.

Maybe Im clutching at straws here but could it be that my unregistered copy of WinRar is slipping errors in when I unpack the archives as an incentive for me to register, though its never done this previously as far as I am aware.

[Belgarath]

Ok, I recommend you do the following steps

1. Make sure GameBase is closed

2. Run GBToolbox, open up the GBST tree, right click on the GBST mdb and click scan and fix errors.

3. Delete the GBGame folder that is on the root of the drive where you installed GameBase

4. run regedit and go to the following location

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GB64\GameBase\GameBase\GBST v3.1d

Right click on the GBST v3.1d folder and select delete!

5. Close regedit, and run GameBase again, you will have to reconfigure your options for it, but you shouldn't have any problems now.

[mwaawm]

thanks for that Belgarath, will try that over the weekedn and let you know how I get on.

[mwaawm]

Belgarath did you mean for me to do all those steps before I unisntalled GamebaseST?

I followed those steps (without uninstalling) but when I run gamebase I still get the same problems. Will try uninstalling and reinstalling now having followed your advice and see if that fixes things.

[Belgarath]

You shouldn't have had to uninstall GameBase...So the fact you're still having problems means your setup is seriously screwed up.

Ok that might sound a little harsh, but there's obviously something about your system that GameBase doesn't like, probably some piece of software you've got installed. I dread to think what though, no one should have the amount of problems you experience.

[mwaawm]

To be honest in spite regularly running adaware and spybot my system still seems to have loads of crap it launches at start up as well as background processes (the majority fo which I have no clue whether they are needed or not) running most of the time, so it may well be one of those....

[unseenmenace]

Run MSCONFIG from the Run box in the Start Menu and then post a screen grab of the Startup Tab so I can see all the entries. Then I can tell you which are safe to temporarily disable or are necessary or bad.

[mwaawm]

Heres a couple of shots of my Msconfig, dont know if it sheds any light on the matter...

[PaulB]

If I were you I'd disable everything except for these:

ctfmon
rundll32
MsnMsgr - If you use msn messenger. Otherwise disable it.

Definitely disable the Google Toolbar Notifier as it's adware
The Nintendo thing you can probably leave enabled if you know what it is.
The Windows Desktop... I can't see the rest of it, but it probably won't be needed.

By the looks of it you have spyware/adware on your system. Have you got 'Spybot Search & Destroy'? It's the best (and free) program out there.

[Desty]

There's no need to go disabling things. Just kill them in the process manager one-by-one, running the program every time until you find the culprit.
If it's none of those, it could be a service, a driver or a DLL Gamebase uses.

[unseenmenace]

I normally go for disabling all startup progs and all non-Microsoft services to start with. If Gamebase works fine then you at least know its one of those things (or a combination of 2 or more) that is upsetting the system. Then you can re-enable all services and reboot to see if its a start-up prog or a service thats doing it. Then having narrowed it down to a category re-enable things one at a time and see how it goes each time. You can just kill things off in the Task Manager but its not always as easy to see whats what from there.

[mwaawm]

Thanks for the advice guys, I am in the middle of doing an adaware, spybot and micorsoft defender scan session. Once its complete I'll try Gamebase again and if still experience problems try stepwise task disablement.

Other than using the aforementioned programs I've always been wary of disabling or getting rid of tasks in case I ended up messing with software critical to any of the hardware on my laptop, but guess its about time I grip the bull by the horns if I want to have Gamebase working correctly.

[unseenmenace]

Usually the worst you can do by disabling tasks with MSCONFIG is to prevent certain peripherals from working or cut off your internet connection and you can easily turn them back on again if they do cause problems. If the worst should happen and the machine won't boot poperly anymore then you should be able to boot in Safe Mode and run MSCONFIG from there to put things back to normal.

[mwaawm]

Well I tried this again last night but also used the name fixing utrility from the atomas site and thankfully I havent encountered the freeze up bug at all when playing around this morning

Just need to set up the emulators now so I can launch games to play instantaneously while Im browsing.

Thanks once again to all who have worked on this.


-edit- I spoke too soon about everything working fine, Im getting the freezing bug again but have idnetified that it now only seems to arise when I have gamebase style picture viewing set (when it loads all the pics for a particular game) as opposed to not being encountered when I have mame style viewing (where only the 1st pic is loaded for each game)

[ham90mack]

Well, I guess the solution is not to use the MAME style... I could not duplictate your problem on my computer, so there must be something wrong with your system that causes somewhat random crashes with the single picture load. Why would you want to load only one picture anyway?

[mwaawm]

Aaah no I seem to have been misunderstood. The crashing bug only occurs if I have the database set to the style that loads multiple pics (Gamebase style). When I do this it loads up all the available pics for the title whose database entry I happened to be viewing at the time and will maybe work fine while a browse 1 or 2 further games at the most but I can almost guarantee by the time I click on any 3rd title it will freeze and crash.

If I have the single pic mode set (Mame style) then I can browse the titles to my hearts content without it crashing. A seperate issue that arises in this mode is that when I am in Mame style clicking on the right hand side of screenshots does not step through to the next available pic as it should. The only way for me to view the other pics for a game is to load them up individually in the viewer. Clicking on the left of screenshots does brings up a zoomed up view as its supposed to so Im not sure why this problem is arising with trying to quickly view the other pics.

[Belgarath]

It's still a problem with your system, as I (and I'm sure many other people) have had it on gamebase style pics for years without experiencing any of your problems..

Have you tried upgrade to GameBase v1.2?

http://gb64.com/download.php?DL_ID=14&M_ID=1&MD_ID=29

[mwaawm]

Ooh I didnt know there was a new version of the gamebase file availabel I've been using 1.1 from the atomas site, I'll check the newer version out later on , thanks.