I am deeply hopeful that someone here can help me.

I played SupCom FA for a while in early 2010, after I finally got hardware that could handle it. I uninstalled last summer. Recently I got ancy and re-installed, and the game's begun to crash a LOT. I'm almost sure it didn't do it before because I'd have never finished the single-player campaign.

I've done all the research I can find, here and elsewhere, nothing is panning out.

System:
OS Vista, 64-bit, SP2, regularly updated
AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core 6400 - 3.20Ghz, 4 GB RAM
Graphics: ATI Radeon 4800
For what it's worth, I see that I have 2.45 Gigs of available physical memory running nothing but Firefox, and 6.6 gigs of virtual memory available with 4 gigs of page file.

Fixes:
I've patched to the most recent version via the auto-patch on GPG.net.
I just un- and re-installed the game this morning.
On my graphics card, I'm using application settings for anti-aliasing and anti-entropic filtering. I have disabled my "Catalyst A.I.". Adaptive anti-aliasing is disabled.
I did have the sorian A.I. mod installed, a recent version. I removed it by moving the 2 .scd files to a new directory (dumped them in fonts directory instead - gonna try moving them out entirely - when I did this my current saves stopped loading completely - old saves and new attempts at campaign load but crash randomly as per original problem) I have not heard of current Sorian AI version causing crashes to desktop.

What else? Oh, the problem. The game locks randomly, and usually my whole PC will lock as well. An infinite stutter is heard in the background. Sometimes Vista will successfully kill the program and give me a "Forged Alliance stopped working" message. It often locks up at around 25 minutes of playing, but will also sometimes lock right away if I try to save. Other hand, 2 days ago I got 90 minutes of play without saves. I've made it through small skirmishes without a problem - the locking seems to be more frequent on single-player. The variability of it makes me suspicious of a memory thing, but I have way too much memory to be leading to that (and SupCom is never using more than 600 megs of RAM if I check Task Manager after it crashes (and the .exe is still there)

Oh, by the way, the saves that won't load after I moved the Sorian mod files produce a ton of stuff in the FA debugger (normal failures do not). Am happy to paste it.

Please, please, please help. Thanks so much in advance!

I can't always get back to the forum but will try to check every day.

Forgot to mention! I also disabled my Digital Output Device (SPDIF) as mentioned in one of the stickies here.

That link actually leads to a 404 error.

ya the servers trying to kill it self should be up soon i think and i hope lol

was there some sort of advice on it that you could just tell me in words? is it my videocard / graphics chip?

You need to run the game as admin and and set the compatiblity mode to windows xp to see if that helps

No, forgot to mention that I've tried it but it hasn't noticeably helped. Not sure about relative timing but crashes still happen.

whats mods u using?

OK, after replying to your PM I've now dug up your thread, so a bit more info here.

This does not look in any way like a graphics issue.

If it's a memory issue it may be that it's picking up a fault in a ram module. try running a memtest and seee if anything shows up.

Having masses of memory isn't necessarily a fix, as SupCom is only a 32 bit program so can only address about 3GB.

I've not played supcom for about 2 years, so I'm afraid I can't be much more use - Hopefully someone can show up with a bit more info. It may be well worth your time looking back through some of the older tech support threads though.

Thanks for the advice, xenoc.

Reddev, I'm using only the most recent Sorian AI mod.

Try get rid of soran for teh moment and see if it crashs at all

Ugh. So, update on my continued quest to be able to play this game:

#1. It turns out my videocard driver was out of date (2009). I updated it today. Just had game crash after 30 minutes.

#2. I also ran a memtest for 2.5 hours and found 42 errors and one bad address block. I have no idea what to do with or about it. I don't know which RAM module the bad address block is in (heck, it could be in the cache, right?). And I don't know what to do about it. Heck, I don't even know if all 42 errors are related to the one bad address block it showed.

#3. Also, who knows if this is why Supcom FA is crashing?

Anyone know anything about memtests and how to trace a memory address to an address block?

the 42 errors in your momory could be used with fa when it is running that mybe why its crashing all the time.

Are you still under warrenty?

How many sticks of RAM do you have? The only way to know which stick is bad is to take all of them out except for 1, run memtest on it, then repeat with all of the other sticks individually. You will have to buy new RAM to replace the bad stick(s) as there really is no way to repair bad RAM.

Do you have 4GB of RAM? Go to the Start menu then search dxdiag and run the DirectX Diagnostics Tool. It should show you how much RAM you have. The thing with RAM errors is that it should affect any program that is using the bad location. When I had a RAM error, programs like explorer.exe, svchost.exe, and firefox.exe were crashing for no apparent reason. I only had 2GB, but if you have 4 or more, then perhaps FA is the only program that will use the bad locations.