Hello,
I have been reading the threads and have reading that many, many gamers are having all kinds of OpenGl issues when playing Half - Life and using Windows XP.
I also am one of the and have experienced various degrees of success and failure.
I am very much involved i this industry and see all kinds of ‘defects’ that involve pc hardware, video drivers and all kinds of other anomailies.
For the most part after playing thousands of hours of Half Life I have used W2K and for the most part its a fairly stable platform for running Half-Life.
WIth a variety of video adapters, ie Voodoo series , Gforce series, and ATI Radeon series.
But moving to Windows XP has been full of intermittent heartburn!!!
I would like this post be a gathering place for HALF LIFE users that are trying to get HAlf Life to run in a stable way on their Windows XP systems.
I have a Shuttle AK31 ver 3 motherboard and a Gforce 4 4600 Titianium video adapter. It has the VIA 266A chipset. SO i have to use Via 4-in-1 Drivers, (version 4.42).
I am using all the latest XP fixs, SP1 etc. from WindowsUpdate.
I am using Nvida, unsigned (non-WHQL) drivers from Nvidia 41.09.
The major issues I am having are intermittent HL.exe errors and ntdll.dll errors.
If select start, programs, accessories, system tools, system information you will get to a window that show you all kinds of info abbout your system.
Click of Software Environment and select Windows Error Reporting. You will see a listing of all the errors that have occurred and have been captured by XP. WHn you see the do you want to send this info to Microsoft or not message pop up window.
If your having Hl.exe issue they will be her along with some technical address stuff that does not mean a lot to ‘us’
My HL.exe errors seem totally random.
I have tried the various HL.exe command line fixes using the -nocdaudio in the command line for starting up Half Life.
I use Gamespy as a front end to starting HL and findng my favorite servers to play on.
My errors seem to be lockups due to the HL.EXE faults that show up in the error log.
I will be playing for 10-20 minutes and for no apparent reason the Half Life game is stopped by this HL Windows trap messageing system…
Yo exit out and either send the info to MIcrosoft or not then go back into the game via Gamespy and start all over and yo will experience this lock up again randomly
I have tried not using a Virus program ( I use AVG) and have tried turning off y software firewall program(I use ZoneAlarm, nto the PRo version). Still I get these hangs.
I get occaisional ntdll.dll hangs or traps or faults…
From what little I have been able to garner, MIcrosoft in their Knowledge base tells you HL.EXE is Incompatible with Windows XP!!!
They have several issues with several verisons of Half Life and the this incompatibility is mentioned BUT the solutions is NOT. Microsoft instructs you to go to Sierra.com for a solution.
A friend across town has a W2K system with aGforce 3 adapter and all the latest stuff, drives etc…and runs Virus and Zonealarm and has this system acting as a HALF LIFE SERVER, stable and NO hangs!!
On his second system SOYO KT333 based board A Dragon Ultra Platinum, with WINDOWS XPPro, he has a ATI Radeon 9700 with the laest drivers from ATI…he gets HL.exe errors all day long!!
We have been trying to determine where the fault could be, and we are both good troubleshooters, by the lets swap this for that routine, and we have replaced video adapters, from the ATI Radeo 9700 to the ‘other’ stable systems Gforce 3 44400 adatper, still hangs…
We are down to either the system board or power supply, but for some reason I do not think its that, I wish I could make some sense of the actual fault module information that is presented in the system information panels…
There seesm to be a possible interaction with the motherboard chipset, ther bussmaster drivers used, many board manufactures have changed these drivers as processor speed, AGP stuff, and new OS have arrived on the scene, trying to find a combination that works for Half Life can be very painful.
Ok, enough rambling on, If anyone wants to add anything that may help Half Life gamers
find a stable solution to these HL.exe errors while in game or any other faults that happen with WINDOWS XP, please chime in…
I also have written Sierra and would encourage thsoe that have this proble do likewise…if its a Sierra issue (once someone does ‘root cause determination’) then we need to keep pinging them!!
I apologize for any mispellings!!
Thanks.
Alex