EoSD makes my computer crash

[Kefit]

I've been playing the Touhou games on my current hardware configuration for years without having any issues. However, in late 2009 my boot drive crashed and I lost everything on it. Since starting with a fresh install of Windows XP on a new drive things have been acting a bit wonky in the Touhou realm.

All of the Windows games are now prone to randomly locking up at what seem like arbitrary times. This lock-up usually, but not always, results in a hard freeze of my entire system, forcing me to perform a hard reset. However, the lock-up is fairly infrequent when playing PCB or later games. But with EoSD I am lucky to get through a single stage in practice mode without a crash occurring.

I tried updating the drivers for my graphics card, but that didn't solve the issue. I also confirmed that my computer isn't mysteriously overheating when these crashes occur. I'm considering replacing my graphics card entirely (it's about time to get a new one anyway), but before I do that I'd like to see if anyone has any ideas for how I might solve this crash problem.

[Barrakketh]

Have you tried a torture test with Prime95?

[Kefit]

I'm not familiar with whatever that is. Please elaborate.

[Barrakketh]

I'm not familiar with whatever that is. Please elaborate.

Well, it's a program written to find Mersenne prime numbers.  There's actually a distributed part of that effort so it works like folding.net in a fashion, but we don't need to worry about that.

The other use is to torture test CPUs (and memory if you choose the Blend test).  It's mainly used by enthusiasts to make sure the system is stable after overclocking (usually letting it run anywhere from 12-24 hours).  It can also detect some memory errors that memtest86+ won't.  Hopefully you've already tried testing your memory with that;)

The idea is to let it run for a while (I usually go with Blend) and just make sure that there are no errors.  If it encounters an error the tests will halt.  If there is an error there could be a few reasons: faulty PSU, RAM, CPU, motherboard.  If there are no errors it's likely that there's either an issue with your graphics driver or GPU.  Do you play in a window, or full-screen?

[Kefit]

My computer managed 15 hours of continuous prime95 blend torture test without any errors occurring.

The crash problem occurs whether I am playing windowed or full screen.

The crash problem occurs whether I let my monitor driver or my graphics card handle scaling.

I have discovered that, after a crash and lock-up occur, if I mash alt-f4 enough it will sometimes close the game and return my system to normal functionality.

[Kefit]

I ran an artifacts test with ATITool for an hour without any issues occurring.

I also tortured my graphics card with this thing for half an hour. Doing so ate up most of my system's processing ability, but it survived to the end without any issues aside from that.

At this point I think the issue is software rather than hardware, but aside from that I'm stumped.

[Kefit]

Addendum: EoSD crashes far more often on stage five than on any other stage. I can usually complete several runs of any other stage before getting a crash, but stage five almost always crashes before I even finish with midboss Sakuya.

[?lice Bl?ckb?rn]

Out of curiosity: what happens when running EoSD in Windowed mode?

[Kefit]

As I stated above, the crashes occur whether I play windowed or full screen. When I am playing windowed and a crash occurs, it still hangs my entire system. I am not able to simply click another window or otherwise deactivate the EoSD window until I get it to force quit.

I am usually capable of making the force quit happen whether I am windowed or full screen.

On another note, I have now tried with and without the English patch, with and without the vsync patch, with 16 bit and 32 bit color. None of those make a difference, the crashes still occur regardless.

[Iryan]

Have you tried modifying your compatibility settings?

[Kefit]

Setting the .exe to Windows 98 compatibility does appear to fix the problem. However, it also introduces an enormous amount of control lag, which the vsync patch just exacerbates.

By the way, I'm running Windows XP sp3 in Japanese locale.

EDIT: Just to be clear, the control lag renders the game unplayable, so this problem is not solved yet.

[Barrakketh]

Have you tried downgrading your video drivers to a previous version?  Like, maybe one from around the time you had to reinstall?  Even if it isn't a permanent solution (maybe you need a feature from recent versions) it might help pin down the problem.

[Kefit]

The problem occurred both before and after I updated my drivers to the newest version. Prior to this I was using drivers that came on the install CD. I believe that I used these same CD drivers on my previous install of Windows as well.