Application Unresponsive
July 29th, 2013
I recently aquired an old favorite game: “Diggles the Myth of Fenris.”
This game never got big due to crash/framerate/etc issues smothering the game, however after alot of work and searching I managed to fix just about all the problems. Game works beautifully, play it for several hours, save, exit. And from that point on there exe stops responding.
I try to run it in a million different ways, I reinstalled it several times, rebooted the computer, and even ran it on 2 different computers, and still the same issues, works then simply doesnt.
There are no error messages, crashes, or anything, it simply goes through the whole UAC rigamorole (and I tried it with UAC turned off), starts loading, and then nothing. I searched the Windows 7 event viewer, and the whole instance isnt even recorded.
I have no idea how to even approach this issue as usually crashes, bugs etc offer clues as the to the cause, from here I have nothing to go on.
Has anyone ever encountered this before?
Have you tried the “Run as Administrator” and Compatibility mode?
In order to make it work in the first place, I had to…
– Run as Administrator
– Xp Compatability Mode
– Edit Registry to run it in window mode, fix the frame rate bug
– Run it through a short cut with the extension -console in order to save/load (the save/load function does not work properly, and starting a new game would drop the max framerate to 5)
On both computers it worked flawless after the said fixes, and the minute I saved, and exited it stopped responding.
However after some digging in the “Resource Monitor” Diggles.exe (the applicaiton file) shows up on there but is instantly terminated, could it be that something from the OS (w7 home) is interfering?
The game is really old, and some old games won’t work well on newer Operative Systems…
If you could try it on Windows XP it would probably give no issues at all.
See that would be my guess to, however what I cannot explain, is why it worked in the first place, I assume something must have changed after I quit it the first time. As I mentioned above, after all the fixes I had to do in order to make it work on the newer OS it played perfectly fine. As soon as I closed the applicaiton, it would never run again, no crash messages, no errors, (it doesnt even appear in event log), only a brief appearnce in resource monitor, saying the process has been terminated, and then it dissapears without a trace. Could something have happened after it ran? Some sort of file written afterwards that conflicts with it?
Lools like something related with graphics or something similar. See if you can run the game w/o drivers on safe mode to see if that’s the cause.
Many thanks so far gentlemen.
Torrance, per your suggestion, I booted up in safe mode, although the application did not display visually (due to safe mode I imagine), both the task manager and the resource monitor listed the application as “running.”
As opposed to not appearing in task manager, or being instantly listed as “terminated” under the resource monitor. It would seem you might be right, the display might just be the one to blame. Question is, where to proceed from there?
Get disk pulse and open the game let it run so as dp to collect data and save the report; Upload it here.
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Sorry, I have completely missed your response… I tried to d/l the game myself to see what is wrong and it seems that the game is extremely poorly coded. I did managed to play it though. Which system you formatted? If it was the one you gave the DP log, there are indications of a rootkit installed which may have survived the format. I suggest that you run a scan with an AV bootable CD to make sure it’s not infected. I’d abandon the tries to play the game though, seems that it lacks quality in every aspect… I guess nostalgia isn’t always a good thing
I tried it on my desktop tower first which yielded the main result.
Secondly I tried it on a newly aquired laptop and again same result.
Thirdly, I had a couple problems with my tower so I reformated it, and tried the game again, it installed as always, played and then died out. However it reinstallations yield no result only a complete system reformation allows you to get through it.
Although I have been wondering, when you initially install it prior to cracking it, it gives you 2 shortcuts on the desktop, one for running the game the other for “buying” the game. Since the game works then does not, could it be a problem with the crack itself, and as you yourself said the game is riddled with problems, I have a feeling the game initially installs as a demo but due to some error it does not notify you when it expires.
No, actually (according to numerous threads) it was NOT a cracking problem but the production company’s fault… Only temporary solutions were found and none of them lasted. What was the game genre? How did it “felt” like? Maybe someone will be able to suggest a similar one to you.
No, actually (according to numerous threads) it was NOT a cracking problem but the production company’s fault… Only temporary solutions were found and none of them lasted. What was the game genre? How did it “feel” like? Maybe someone will be able to suggest a similar one to you.
I came across another copy of the game and finally it worked. It would seem the one posted on warez-bb and being the one I got is faulty. As well as most copies out there that I tried, which yielded the same problem. Though after some research I found out the game varies between the English version, German version and Russian version, you would think the only differences would be language but apperantly the coding in the german version (Wiggles I believe) has the best coding (given the circumstance).
You were right Jack_Torrance, the problem was the coding itself.