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ram1220

RC4 Crashing When Using Autosave

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I just started having the infamous black screen crashes in FS9 within the past few days. Only thing that changed in my computer is I upgraded my video card from an ATI Radeon 4850 512mb to an AMD Radeon 7850 2gb. I'll be flying and I get a black screen followed by the message that FS needs to restart. I downloaded the most recent version of Autosave from Pete Dawson's page. Autosave works great as long as Radar Contact 4 is not running. If RC4 is running I get an error ding and then a pop up saying that RC had a problem writing to FS9. RC4 has already crashed and closed itself by this time. If I am not running RC4 then Autosave works fine. I also have the same problem when trying to save a flight manually in FS9 if RC4 is running. I can save the flight but RC4 crashes with the above error. Everything works fine if RC4 is not running. Has anyone else seen this or heard about it? Any ideas? I tried to find a setting in the Autosave.dll to keep it from saving the RC4 part of my flight but there is no such setting.

My system specs are in my profile if it helps. I am using the most updated version of Radar Contact 4 as well as the latest FSUIPC for FS9 that's listed on Pete's page. Autosave is also the latest version that is listed on Pete's page also.

For now I am just flying without using RC4 until I can get this sorted. I hate flying for a couple hours only to have FS9 crash. I would rather use Autosave instead of RC4 until I can get this solved. Thanks to anyone for help.

 

 

Bob

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Win XP Pro SP3 is the latest update. I suspect it might have to do with a 2 GB video card capacity. Some PC BIOS's can not handle that plus you are running 8GB of system ram.

 

Your BIOS has a setting regarding a video window (video ram capacity) that you might want to decrease.

 

Are you using XP 32 or 64. If 32 have you enabled large address capability modifying boot.ini? Have you modified the header of fs9.exe with a utility to access 3GB? I've had that problem.

 

It sounds like it could be a ram mapping problem mostly with your card. The error happens with the number of apps running getting into ram use above 2GB and ram overlapping occurs.

 

Here's a source for getting Win 32 and 64 bit drivers for video cards if you need to try different drivers. Some are betas and others are WHQL (certified final version release):

 

http://www.guru3d.co...d_drivers.html.

 

If you have a 64 bit system FS9 runs in a 32 bit environment (if in the Program Files X86 folder) but might be OK in the regular one.

 

Anyway, see what settings are in your BIOS and video card drivers. Since everything worked before changing your video card it seems that could be the culprit. See if there are any BIOS patches applicable on the MSI site as well.

 

One more thought:

Find FS9.cfg (hidden file) and insure only one display card is listed there.

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I'm running 32 bit Win XP. I have the 3gb patch applied. I let FS9 build a new FS9.cfg when I installed the new card. This hard drive only runs FS9. I have another drive with Win 7 64 bit for everything else. I don't seem to have the crashes to black screen anymore with the actual FS program. But RC4 still crashes whenever I save a flight. It happens whether I use Autosave or if I disable Autosave and save the flight manually in FS. RC4 crashes every single time. The error message I am getting is this: Run-Time Error 76 Radar Contact.FSUIPC.rcv4code. I do have the latest version of FSUIC for FS9 and it is registered. I feel the problem lies within the Radar Contact program itself. I build and repair computers for a living. I honestly don't feel there is anything wrong with my system. There is some type of conflict between RC4 and Autosave that causes RC4 to crash. I feel the fault lies with RC4 since this is not the first problem I have had with RC4. Any other ideas? Oh just for grins I installed my old Radeon 4850 video card. RC4 still crashes whenever I try and save a flight. Thanks for any other ideas.

 

Bob

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runtime error 76 is path not found.

 

As you know, the registry is read into ram when Win boots. So first use this free FS registry checker app to check FS9's path:

http://www.flight1.com/view.asp?page=library

 

Reset paths in RC's setup. Those are stored in the RC folder in rcv3.dat. Included is your last flight full path and also your plan folder path. If you browse in setting those paths and cancel the browse that might corrupt rcv3.dat and RC might not start so back this file up before inspecting it. Formatting is critical. Here is the contents of mine;

 

Sun Contry Airlines Inc - USA,suncountry,1, 1 , 30 , 20 , 50 , 1000 , 0 , 9.999999E+29 , 10 , 0 , 1 , 1 , 0 , 1 , 0 , 1 , 200 , 1200 , 0 ,, 0 ,C:\Documents and Settings\Ron Ginsberg\My Documents\Flight Simulator Files\KMSP-KSAN.PLN

1800 , 1800 , 1800

1

1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0

1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0

1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0

0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0

0

0

 

0

0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0

0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0

0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 0

0

C:\Documents and Settings\Ron Ginsberg\My Documents\Flight Simulator Files

 

 

In your FS9 folder is a file called autosave.cfg. The first section, User, allows inserting and editing parameters as explained in the autosave.txt documentation file. The Files section is maintained by autosave itself and must not be changed. It is the autorotation file naming convention data.

 

Here's mine:

[user]

Interval=180

Files=0

[Files]

Next=9

1=Sun 212414

2=Sun 212713

3=Sun 213013

4=Sun 213312

5=Sun 213612

6=Sun 213912

7=Sun 214211

8=Sun 214511

9=Sun 211815

10=Sun 212114

 

 

Here is one reference:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Runtime-Error-76---What-is-Runtime-Error-76?&id=1254447

 

Every time you add something to the FS and Win mix, more ram is used. A lot of people had trouble with the Win XP 3GB switch including me. I had intermittent operation with 4 GB installed and less but still present with 3 GB installed. My BIOS is one revision below the last for my P4 PC using Win XP Pro 32 SP3. These problems occurred with heavy ram use.

 

FS does a lot of heavy rendering in CPU RAM, not GPU RAM. Because of this you might be experiencing RAM corruption in the registry RAM area.

 

Adding the new video card may have increased RAM area problems.

 

A lot of folks are running FS9 and RC under Win 7 64 without ram problems letting Win 7 64 handle RAM management. If you want to try that the only caveats are setting shortcuts to FS and rcv4.exe with its properties set to a program (not user) security level set to run as admin especially RCv4. Security can result in an RT error 76 if Win 7 does not allow access. It has also been published that FS graphics performance increases in Win 7. It has been surmised that Win7 can trap complex math calls and pass them to the better performing math processor on the GPU card if idle. Since FS9 does most of its rendering in the CPU those calls would be trapped and passed to the GPU - like it should have been done.

 

Regarding the video driver here is a good resource for drivers past and present:

http://www.guru3d.com/files_categories/videocard_drivers.html

 

See if you can find anything.

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I'll try the path checker today and see if it helps. Other than that I don't know what else to do except maybe a reinstall of RC4? I'm not having any problems with FS9 crashing anymore. I found that it was happening if I tried to change video settings for my card while FS9 was running. If I didn't restart FS9 after changing a setting the sim would crash after a few minutes. Now that I have the settings I want FS9 no longer crashes. But I still can't save a flight with or without using Autosave without RC4 crashing. I mean the flight will save just fine in FS9 but RC4 crashes everytime. Here's my autosave.cfg.

 

[user]

Interval=60

Files=10

[Files]

Next=6

1=Tue 141829

2=Tue 141943

3=Tue 144912

4=Tue 145011

5=Tue 145111

6=Tue 135842

7=Tue 135941

8=Tue 140041

9=Tue 140140

10=Tue 141729

 

Like I said I'll try the Path checker. If that doesn't work I might try an reinstall of RC4. If that won't work then my days of using Radar Contact are over. I would rather be able to use Autosave just in case of that one lone FS9 crash during a long flight. Thanks for your help.

 

Bob

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BTW:

 

When I referred to the display device in FS9.cfg I meant to be sure only one was listed, not both your old and new card. That is a known "feature".

 

Last resort is to turn on debug before loading the plan in RC and doing the flight. If possible at crash time, alt-tab to RC and use the normal quit button in an attempt to save the log file in the RC folder. See the pinned topic on submitting those.

 

To find the actual Win event log, before starting go into the control panel/admin tools. Open the event manager and clear previous entries. Then do the RC-FS auto save exercise (remember it only works when the aircraft is not on the ground) and at the crash close everything and then examine the Win event report. That might give you more details.

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Just wanted to update this thread in case others ever experience the problem I was having. I clicked on the button to Rebuild Scenery (can't remember exact name of function) inside of Radar Contact 4. I let the program do its thing. Whatever it did has solved my RC4 crashing problem. I can now save flights with Autosave without RC4 crashing. It doesn't make any sense to me as to why rebuilding the scenery was the fix but it was.

 

Bob

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