This hasn't been true in a long time. Things like directx, directsound, etc eliminated the majority of these issues, if not all of them. I can remember having to set the port of my soundblaster card and information like that in old games, the games no longer interact directly with the hardware. If there is a hardware problem with your PC, its on a driver level or its damaged.

Nope. IRQ conflicts are a lot more common than you think. Yes, games don't interact with hardware, but it hasn't changed the function or purpose of a hardware interrupt. If IRQ's of critical devices are shared, there will be problems. Here are a few sample bits from around the web.

If your machine hangs at regular intervals, slows down to a crawl for no apparent reason, and generally behaves as if possessed of a mind of its own, the cause could be a hardware interrupt conflict. When two hardware devices are assigned to the same IRQ, one or both of the devices may decide not to function properly or not function at all.

Tracing IRQ Conflicts
Symptoms:

machine locks up, or will not boot
Corrupt data transfer
loss of sound, video, or other resources
BSOD
CTD


OR

IRQ's are hotlines to the main computer (CPU) that allow devices connected to the computer to signal the CPU that they need immediate attention. If you're a Batman fan, think of IRQ's as the Batphone - getting his attention immediately.
Not all devices require IRQ lines, which is good news because in modern computers, we only have 16 of them. Of those, 3 are already dedicated to the main system board itself - the system timer, keyboard, and memory parity error signal. That leaves only 13 for all the other devices connected to your computer. This is why IRQ conflicts are probably the #1 problem faced by computer users when they add hardware to their computer.

OR

http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-886-Fixing-That-IRQ-Conflict.html

Granted these articles are a little dated, but they all apply to windows XP. IRQ sharing is alive and well Virginia, and it was a bad thing years ago, and it hasn't changed. Everything mentioned above is exactly what people are complaining about over and over again in the these forums. Is it coincidence that all the symptoms are the same, not likely.

well my computer never crashed

stevenmc wrote:

Granted these articles are a little dated, but they all apply to windows XP. IRQ sharing is alive and well Virginia, and it was a bad thing years ago, and it hasn't changed. Everything mentioned above is exactly what people are complaining about over and over again in the these forums. Is it coincidence that all the symptoms are the same, not likely.

So dated it was written only 5 months after XP was released. Since then there has been 3 service packs and numerous fixes. I can't even recall the last time I saw someone with an IRQ problem. Chances are they were using older hardware not designed for XP, and possibly with driver issues. 6 years later if someone is using hardware not designed for xp with modern drivers, they have bigger problems than spore.

My game has crashed once or twice over the week, so there is crashes, but it seems to slow down its detioration by increasing the graphic's cache for some reason (well at least for me).

crossmr wrote: So dated it was written only 5 months after XP was released. Since then there has been 3 service packs and numerous fixes. I can't even recall the last time I saw someone with an IRQ problem. Chances are they were using older hardware not designed for XP, and possibly with driver issues. 6 years later if someone is using hardware not designed for xp with modern drivers, they have bigger problems than spore.

Please specify which service pack has changed the function of an IRQ?

EA has a problem with Spore crashes and needs to adress this issue sooner rather than later. My system crashes 50% of the time when trying to save the game and this is simply unacceptable. (Yes, I meet all of the specs and the OS and video drivers are all up to date.) I have no problem with other high system requirement games. Given the number of posts around the web on this problem, it is inconcievable that this problem would not have been manifest in a proper QA beta test of the code.

When are you people going to wake up and smell the stink?

Go take a look at the Forums for ALL other PC based EA games. EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. has had major code issues on release. I have experienced several of them myself. The ENTIRE Battlefield series has had issues for example. ALL of them, have eventually been hammered out, but ALL patches took months before they posted any patches.

Yes, StevenMC, it very well could be hardware, however, this game isn't exactly cutting edge, nor demanding when it comes to hardware, and the fact that the problem exists across multiple hardware types, has a tendency to indicate that it is not a specific hardware issue. Plus if it was IRQ problems, they would generally appear in ALL games that call on the hardware. Now the only case where that might not be the case, is if spore is using some new custom audio/graphics engine, that has never been used before. However, having personal friends that work inside EA, they have all inquired, and found that spore ISN'T running some new custom graphics/audio engine (fairly obvious tbh), so more then likely irq issues are not the problem here.

Now, I work for a software company myself, and I can tell you first hand, bugs get through. You can spend bazillions on pre-testing, but there is no such synthetic test that replaces the open market. There simply is no way to reproduce all the variables available in software/hardware configurations.

So, the best option, get it to work as best as possible, post it, start making some money (let's get real, it IS a profit based company after all!), and then start investigating the priority bugs as they appear.

The game runs for the most part, has a few crashes/graphical issues (that all seem related to about 3-5 total issues from what I can gather). So as a software company goes, hammering down 5 or so issues shouldn't be that hard to do (My company of 18 people, can post nearly 25 major fix's in a week if we focus).

Realistically, EA should be able to hammer down these issues in a fairly short order. The on-load CTD's all seem to be related to driver issues (common with games). The Graphical weirdness/jitter/black screen/cannot leave home world after fight issues, all seem to be a problem when certain data is being recorded to there reference tables in memory, something is either over-wrighting, or writing incorrectly to memory somewhere, which is causing the graphics/game engine to fail, but fail without hitting a error handling, so the game just stops responding.

This is normally obvious to coders if a swap out/back returns control of the software (ctrl-alt-delete and back for example). That also explains why most game functions continue to interract but cannot expand beyond what is in memory, because the engine has essentially lost it's ability to know what to do next (very much like a segment of the game engine is being unloaded from memory, and cannot reload on request).

Anyway, your best option people, post your error logs (for the CTD issues), if your familliar, post a memory dump of the app WHILE THE PROBLEM IS OCCURING (doesn't count for CTD's), if you HAVE good memory debugging skills (mine suck), then poke around the memory and see if you can see what's going on.

Post your problem OFFICIALLY to EA, posting them on Forums won't get EA to fix them faster. I GUARANTEE, that upper management is ONLY going to pay attention to OFFICIALLY POSTED PROBLEMS that have been sent to EA support, and will ignore Forum bitching. They won't even look at the forums. The senior manager, will generate a report from all the posted problem, and only see 500, instead of seeing the 5000 that are existing on the forums, he/she will make there decision based off of that, not your commentary.

If you have found a FIX, that PROVES the fix, IE, 10+ people try and resolves the issue, then POST AWAY, and maybe even send it to EA Support so it can be made official. Other then that, your wasting your time.

Just my .2 cents for what it's worth.

Let's all evolve a little here guys, and become a little more understanding (yes, I spent money on the software too, just like you, but patience is a virtue, support tickets get the problem resolved).

Spyrule - out.

(edit = SP mistakes)

Spore has never crashed on me yet, in a sense. Playing it on the highest settings with a computer that can handle it easily.

The game runs great and it has never crashed on me. Sometimes I have difficulty searching the sporepedia due to bugs or whatever keeping me from effectively searching online and not connecting me when I'm obviously on my internet connection, but normal use of Spore has never crashed me... yet.

However, I HAVE had crashes happen from non-spore actions when spore was running full-screen. Alt tabbing the Fullscreen mode can lead to some weird things, happening, and Spore crashed on me once when I alt-tabbed to my internet browser(Google Chrome). Not just a game crash, but crashed my entire computer to boot. Spore also seemed to eat up a lot more resources than necessary when running in full screen too.

If I run Spore windowed, those problems don't seem to occur. Weird.

But all-in-all, Spore itself has never crashed itself. But having Spore running and issuing other commands to my computer has caused more than one weird situation.

gikon wrote:Ever wonder why your spore is crashing?
Simple: YOUR COMPUTER SUCKS.

Spore has never crashed for me..EVER..and I play the crap out of the game, I play it on all High, and all the SPORE time.... How does my spore not crash? My computer is above the max needed requirements.

So please people, Stop talking about spore crashing when it is not the games fault.

Just because it runs fine on YOUR system doesn't mean it's not the game's fault. Conversely, however, if other games run fine and Spore crashes, that doesn't mean it IS the game's fault. I'm not saying for sure if it's the game or not, just that the quoted above is a massive logical fallacy.

Right....

My computer is top of line as far as a gaming platform, and was constantly crashing over and over in tribal stage at one point, following the same scenario playing out before me. It hardly ever crashes otherwise. And yet somehow I'm supposed to believe this is a result of my inferior hardware?

Just another bit of insight - some crashes are the result of faulty RAM.

I got a pair of bad RAM sticks from a vendor and they ran fine for a month before the internals began to degrade. At that point, some spots of memory were corrupt and any program that didn't write data to those spots would run fine. Those that did? Crashed eventually.

Thus I had a computer that ran City of Heroes "fine" for twelve hours at a stretch but would crash if I ran Civ IV more than a few hours.

RAM can have problems that aren't detected at the factory and may not show up for some time. So if you have games randomly crashing on you, even if your computer is up to spec... get a copy of MEMtest and check your RAM.

I've found a few crash bugs that are understandable in an initial release, since they're odd things to try.

One I've seen only once was the result of an alien abduction of my chieftain. He doesn't get replaced, and when I clicked on the gift from another tribe, instant crash (CTD).

Something that crashes me very reliably, is when I conquer a planet, resulting in all of the colonies being destroyed, if I try (before leaving) to drop a new colony where one of the old ones was, it crashes immediately (CTD).

Other than those, I've only had a couple of rare, random crashes. Once was a total system lockup in the spaceship editor. Could have been a driver issue, I suppose, but it's been stable for every other game. Otherwise they've just been CTDs in a few places, including once or twice when applying a texture in an editor.

It's been mostly stable, however.

Laptops are notorious for not playing games very well.
I'm not a technical minded person, but apparently their hardware is something that would be bottom of the line for playing games.

morphosiscraft wrote:Laptops are notorious for not playing games very well.
I'm not a technical minded person, but apparently their hardware is something that would be bottom of the line for playing games.

Depends on the laptop. There are laptops spec'd specifically for gaming that do good. The standard off the shelf thing you pick up at Best Buy, however? Not so good for gaming.

gikon wrote:Ever wonder why your spore is crashing?
Simple: YOUR COMPUTER SUCKS.

Spore has never crashed for me..EVER..and I play the crap out of the game, I play it on all High, and all the SPORE time.... How does my spore not crash? My computer is above the max needed requirements.

So please people, Stop talking about spore crashing when it is not the games fault.

Reminder: System specifications don't mean everything. There's a thing called "architecture" that can make or break an entire company's games for your system.
Most notably, my current configuration refuses to run the entire Battlefield series. I have about DOUBLE the "needed requirements" for any of them. I'm well above the requirements for Spore as well, but it crashes at times too. I suggest you not give advice unless you actually know what you're talking about.
As for the reason I've come up with as to the problems with Battlefield? Vista doesn't support hardware accelerated sound, while Battlefield relies on it, and my sound card can't emulate it correctly in software mode, thus the games don't work. So please, be informed about the topics you troll.