HL2 crashing?

[bornl33t]

So I played HL2 at my bros house today and though I was go ahead and get it and play it as I have time. After a hour long install it crashes right after the valve logo. I've done a little bit of looking but can't find any info on this and I'm going to bed. Anyone know whats up?

[quik]

What are your computers specs?

[Mango]

Since the release, they have had issues with sound stuttering/crashing. Some sort of memory buffer overflow. I think if you poke around on Fileplanets half life 2 forum you should be able to find a rememdy fairly quickly.

https://www.fileplanet.com

[Blennidae]

Make sure you have the latest video drivers for your card. When I first installed it would crash during the intro cut scene. After I updated the drivers, no more issues.

[Bolter]

also check your firewall is not asking you to allow HL2 to connect to the internet. There may be a little message from your firewall behind the game screen asking for permission to connect.

[Buff]

newest drivers, update the steam platform, and try again.

[bornl33t]

well I did find a new catalyst driver... which did little more then anoy me.
I tried to disable the sound card and see if that seems to be the issue.
I've search several forums ( when you submit a search on the steam forums it never returns any results... second class programers anyway ) without a result.

I seem to have found a problem that is unique to my computer, yay!

asus a7v333
ati 9600 AIW
gig of p3200 400mgz
80 gig maxtor 7200 rpm ata/133 with 8 meg buffer 60% free
c-media onboard sound

I have a fresh format with minimal apps newest sound and vid drivers...steam should auto-update right? I think I just lost 55$ cause I have no clue what else to try. And support for this stuff is near non-existant

[Buff]

hmmm........
did you check and make sure no firewalls were blocking it?

[brianlojeck]

go to the properties of the shortcut for the game, and in the TARGET box, it'll have a long string pointing to the app. something like


"c:\program files\blahblahblah\steam.exe" -startapp 220

add to the end of that -console

this will disable the 3-d rendered menu screen. if this works, it's a graphics card issue I think.

also, on my own machine it didn't work right if I used... lemme describe it generally, because I don't remember the specifics.

The ati driver for my card came in two flavors. I think one was controlled by the CATALYST control panel, and one was not. (at any rate, one had a feature that the other didn't.) Mine worked only after I installed the one that was not.

seems funny, since ati was pimping the game in the first place, but since they never did send me my free copy I don't expect much out of them... and all I lost was like 10-20mhz on my card (because no catalyst auto-overclocking).

[bornl33t]

Buff-what do firewalls have to do with it? I don't understand?

I tried the -console thing and I can get it to launch into the menu now....but I still can't play the game.

I've tried both versions of the current catalyst driver and neither work.

Who is droping the ball here? I wanna write nasty e-mails!

[brianlojeck]

Buff-what do firewalls have to do with it? I don't understand?

I tried the -console thing and I can get it to launch into the menu now....but I still can't play the game.

I've tried both versions of the current catalyst driver and neither work.

Who is droping the ball here? I wanna write nasty e-mails!

that's an ATI problem. the main difference -console does is eliminates graphics in the menu.

as a last off-the-top-of-my-head resort, go into your hardware control panel, set your graphics card to the most generic 640X480-only driver (shown as being a microsoft driver iirc), and reboot. THEN download and install a new ATI driver.

if that doesn't work, I'd contact ati tech support.

really stupid question, forgive me, I know your smarter then this, but your monitor is plugged into your ati card, and not a motherboard video jack, yes? (hey, Iv'e seen it happen...)

[bornl33t]

that's an ATI problem. the main difference -console does is eliminates graphics in the menu.

as a last off-the-top-of-my-head resort, go into your hardware control panel, set your graphics card to the most generic 640X480-only driver (shown as being a microsoft driver iirc), and reboot. THEN download and install a new ATI driver.

if that doesn't work, I'd contact ati tech support.

really stupid question, forgive me, I know your smarter then this, but your monitor is plugged into your ati card, and not a motherboard video jack, yes? (hey, Iv'e seen it happen...)

heh, yeah it's pluged in to the card lol
I just did a restore on everything ati related. They finally have enough information on the site that i could figure out what was the right software-drivers for my card. I've tried before and always ended up popping the CD into the tray in the end. So if nothing else I finally updated all the different features of the card.

oddly enough when I run ati's test thingy it tells me that I don't have a radeon card and as a solution they tell me to "install a readon graphics card" and on the next line down it says
Graphics card: ATI ATI Radeon 9600

meh first and last ati card, I was warned... ati can't hold a candle to nvidia

[Mango]

meh first and last ati card, I was warned... ati can't hold a candle to nvidia

Don't adopt that attitude! All I have are ATI cards and every one of them work fine. It has to be something else. I have been on many HL2 websites while researching the stuttering/skipping sound issue and make of video card made no difference. It's just a code issue with the game that needs to be patched. It's a buffer overflow error of some type.

[bornl33t]

yeah, it's a little premature to blame ati for this. I guess I'm just frustrated and with all the problems I've been having with my card I just like to blame them for one more.

In other news I'm getting some where.
I called ati and they said it was a steam problem. BUT they told me how to get ahold of steam. I filled out a support request and got a faq of possible problems. And one of those was to try new VIA drivers...which is logical cause that's the other company I have driver issues with all the time. After downloading and installing new VIA IDE and AGP drivers HL2 managed to fade in "H A L F L I F E 2" just enough so I could tell what it was before it dumped... I think I'm close!

[bornl33t]

welp, 4 days later... and still workie... anyone know if I can get a refund? I've not had to do this much research to get a game to work since the dos days where you had to rewrite your autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

I'm irritated to say the least. This is a good sign that the PC gameing days are coming to an end. I knew I shoulda bought a Xbox