Future Pinball crashes. Help! [SOLVED!]

[dekar24k]

Hi guys!

So I'm finally finished building my first arcade cab, but I just noticed I hadn't been thorough enough with the bugfixing. Future Pinball crashes occasionally.. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens once in a while and it's annoying. Sometimes when I launch it from Maximus Arcade all I get is a blank/black screen, sometimes it crashes with the normal Windows error reporting message.

Has this happened to any of you and do you know what might cause it?

I'm using Maximus Arcade v2.10 and Future Pinball v1.9.20081225 on a WinXP Pro SP3 cab.

[billpa]

Do you have any antivirus running? I have seen quite a few people having problems when they have AV software running.

[dekar24k]

Do you have any antivirus running? I have seen quite a few people having problems when they have AV software running.

Nope, no antivirus running on my arcade cabinet. It hasn't crashed all day though, so it's completely random. It happens more frequent on the more "advanced" tables I think, like Road Girls and 3 Angels. I have no idea what's causing it.

[billpa]

Ah...I know what it is. When you are in the editor, under one of the options, disable loading of Images into the Table Editor. This will fix it.

[dekar24k]

Ah...I know what it is. When you are in the editor, under one of the options, disable loading of Images into the Table Editor. This will fix it.

Thanks for the tip, but I've already tried that. I believe it reduced the amount of crashes, but it still crashes occasionally. I will try to tweak the settings some more tonight and see if it'll run stable.

[Space Fractal]

Do the tables works without MA?

It could been like your graphicscard does not have the memory required for some of these memory hungry newer tables, so you might propenty have set some graphics details too high?

But Since you diddent wrote about graphicscard using, I think you should install newset version of DX9c as well drivers. I do heard some newer drivers might crash FP, but it didden't do it here.

[kingb33]

It's the horsepower of your PC.  I had the same exact problem running the really nice tables like 3 Angels etc, at high settings.  Then I got my new PC and it never crashed once after that.

[dekar24k]

I'm using a Intel C2D E7400 @ 2.8GHz, 2GB DDR2 PC6400 ram and a XFX GeForce 8800 GTS in my cabinet, shouldn't it be sufficient to run FP?

I'll try to lower the settings and see if that helps. Thanks again.

[kingb33]

Actually my other PC had just a tad bit more power than that and i still had problems.   I have a Quad core now w/ a Nvidia GTX 280 4GB RAM and have zero problems

[dekar24k]

Actually my other PC had just a tad bit more power than that and i still had problems.   I have a Quad core now w/ a Nvidia GTX 280 4GB RAM and have zero problems

Hmm I see. But, when the tables actually load then they're playing fine with no problems at all. I get nice framerates as well. Also I see that people are playing FP with Pentium 4's and way older GPU's than what I'm using and it still works fine.

I'm pretty sure that it's either a driver problem or it's a memory leak somewhere. It seems like it happens more frequent if I've been playing a lot of other emulators before launching an FP table. If I boot up my arcade and immediately start FP then it usually runs with no problems at all.

I'll dig into it later today, I'm sure it's not a big deal to fix it.

[Space Fractal]

I remember some of these hungry tables did work fine on a Athlon 3200+ but the machine did do a have 4gb ram as well. Can you checkout how much ram it actuelly use when it crash using the taskmask (also checking MA, if this have a memory leak issue)?

[dekar24k]

I remember some of these hungry tables did work fine on a Athlon 3200+ but the machine did do a have 4gb ram as well. Can you checkout how much ram it actuelly use when it crash using the taskmask (also checking MA, if this have a memory leak issue)?

I'll check it out a little later today and see how much memory it's using. I'll post back here with a report.

If it's a RAM issue then I'll just add 2GB of more RAM (RAM isn't exactly expensive these days ).

[Space Fractal]

I tested Road Girs v1 table (that one I found) and it use about 400mb ram with "loading texture in table" disable. I onle play for few minuttes and seen it not crash here, even there is a bug in the table since the camera wont move...

I think you should checkout FP Future forum, since other have issues like this (howover you need register your self to see more forums, like bug report). If FP crash directly, it might been a sound issue as well a graphics driver problem. Some might have succes by using a bit older driver.... Checkout the FP forum and register your self, since some forums is hidden if you do not do that.

[dekar24k]

I did some testing today and eventually I got it working after disabling the high-res textures. Now every table works perfectly.

I'm sure it's a memory leak that has been causing the problem, so I'm going to put 2 more gigs of RAM into the cab tomorrow which I'm sure will solve the problem.

Thanks all for helping out!

[Space Fractal]

I think its not a memory leak, it stable here, some tables just use much ram, otherwise you could see that in the task manager, the memory usable just go up and up. A issue I saw in MultiFE for some months ago and more ram would just result in crash some later on, if there is a ram leak.... It diddent leak here after it was have loaded the table.

[dekar24k]

Ok, so the crashing has stopped, but I just noticed that the black screen issue is still there on occasion. I believe this is because FP doesn't get window focus. This only happens if I launch the game from MA, so it's definitely related to the front-end. Does anyone have any ideas?

[Space Fractal]

It seen it was not fixed in the newer version of FP? What it do if you use the FP Wrapper from http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Wrappers ? The focus is a well known problem and can't been launched from all frontend without a wrapper. You should consult this in the MA forum.

[dekar24k]

It seen it was not fixed in the newer version of FP? What it do if you use the FP Wrapper from http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Wrappers ? The focus is a well known problem and can't been launched from all frontend without a wrapper. You should consult this in the MA forum.

Thanks a lot. I'll check it out tomorrow and report back!

[headkaze]

There is a plugin for MaLa which is supposed to deal with focus issues. Not sure if it will help in this case, but the wrapper is definately worth a shot.