Not exactly like this:
I was playing Fallout 3 about 2 months ago and I was having massive stuttering problems on their cutscenes; but I had to re-encode all the Bink and Smacker videos from 1024 x 768 down to 640x480 and everything worked. I’ve had some issues installing old games but if I can get them to install they usually work perfectly. FL was the first one to really cause this problem; every 3-6 months I’ve had a hard crash but that was typical windows crap that I’ve dealt with ever since I got a Win 95 machine 10-15 years ago

I’ve never run into this constant Hard Crash issue before, even on older games like Baldur’s Gate 1/2/ToB or Icewind Dale 1/2. Though being able to fly around in space no problem and only having the freezing occur when I was docked and not in the more intense 3D environment was a little odd to me. I would’ve figured if things were going to go nutty it would’ve been in the 3D environment, not in the minor cutscenes and FMV sequences on bases and battleships, hell it even froze in the middle of me buying oxygen to trade at one point. So I figured it might be something like the old gold box games where you can run them in windows but they will crash out almost instantly because your processor runs them too fast and they error out (I’m sure the cause is much more complex than that I’m just not 100% on why they crash like that).

So I updated my flconfigdata.txt file with the entries suggested and it sadly crashed on me right during the first cut scene I came across. So I started to pack up my system ready to upgrade to Win 7 when I decided to keep on with the last ditch efforts and I thought to try and downclock my graphics card.

Basically I was thinking that like old 486 games(gold box Krynn series ftw!) you need to slow down the processor otherwise it would crash every time. So I downclocked my card 30% (lowest I could set it in the ATI controls) and I ran all last night perfectly. I am going to upgrade to Win 7 since it seems like a lot of this is caused by my graphics card not working 100% with XP 32 bit (not too shocking since it’s a DX10 base card), but it was nice to get things working and even 30% downgraded I had zero slowdown with all graphics settings maxed out.

This is a custom system I put together but sadly only the Mobo and processor are really nice, I need more RAM and a better card if I wanted to have a screaming system but I was hoping to future proof my processor for a while. Damn money always coming in the way of what I want and what I can get… booo!

Thank you for all the tips and help you have all posted on this forum and around the web, I wouldn’t be playing this game now if it wasn’t for all the help you provided to get me here. Thank you very very very very much!

Who knows maybe you can blow me out of the sky one of these days once I get through the SP campaign. I was feeling spiffy in my Defender in the CA system till I ran across some Daggers who chewed me up and spit me out… ug it’s been a long long long time since I played a space sim.

Thanks for the quick replies, I’ll try the setting you suggested tonight FriendlyFire.

While I do have an GTX7800 nVidia card lying around I’d like to keep with my 5700 if possible. Seems like upgrading to windows 7 is going to be my answer.

I’ll update this tonight/tomorrow morning once I see whats what.

Hello everyone,

I’m sorry to post with a request for my first time but I’m at my wits end and I’m loving FL too much to let it go (for what I can play of it).

I’m having Hard Crash issues which from everything I’ve been reading here and at =EOS= seem to be related to my video card.
I can boot up the game, fly around star systems, jump gate around, my problems start when I dock anywhere.
Any of the FMV or Cutscene can lock up my system, or while I’m trying to sell/purchase anything.
The game literally freezes with a sound loop and everything, it’s a hard system freeze too so no error message or ability to cntl+alt+del to the task manager.
The freeze can happen anytime while I’m not ion my ship; sometimes I get 2 hours of playtime in, sometimes 10 mins.
But the game always locks up my system and makes me do a hard reboot.

I’ve installed 3 of the fan patches (QuickFix 1.0c, Hardware fix, and JFLP all with no effect sadly).
I’ve rolled back my video card drivers to Sept 22nd 2009 when the HD 5700 came out and still no luck there.
I’ve manually added the HD5700 into the flconfigdatabase on several of the lines for ATI products but I’ve had no success.
I’ve turned off and on 3D sound, and I’ve done a clean install with no mods or fixes whatsoever and I keep running into the same problem.

I’ve seen a couple people here on the forums say they’re running the game on the HD series of ATI cards,
so I was wondering if anyone had a suggestion or maybe a flconfigdatabase entry I could nab to try and get this magnificent game working?

My system is:
Windows XP 32bit SP3
Intel Core i7 920 (I know why not Vista or Win 7 yet I’m pretty lazy when it comes to OS upgrades)
4GB of Kingston Hyper-X DDR2
ATI Sapphire HD5700 (non overclocked, factory basic model)