mrjigsaw

I've been having a new problem lately. Every now and then the screen will start jittering and freeze up and the graphics lock. The game continues on, you can cast and all and hear it but the graphics are just locked as if the game was frozen. I'm thinking this alienware keyboard is causing a majority of my problems. Like I said before, simply having it kept sacred from even opening/showing errors etc. Ive tried selective startups on win7. Ive tried so much, this game will not run on my comp on win7 imo. I have given up. Vista seems to have no issue. Still im glad I made the post. The errors I was having were quite rare compared to most, and when I looked for help I couldnt find any. Hopefully this will save some other cause/effect troubleshooters some hours =D

FYI I have been trying to get this running on windows 7 again, just to figure out what exactly the problem is. I read another post on this site of a person who had a problem similar to mine. She would go to open Sacred 2 and the screen would flash black, no errors and no open. This was what mine was doing on w7 and she mentioned she was on an alienware and figured the lighting system was causing the problem. I never thought my keyboard would stop a game from working, but sure enough I went and uninstalled "command center" and the game would open. Apparently if you have alienwares command center installed the game simply will not open or even error. I got through the main loading screen, then it goes to a black screen and its done. It wont get to the main menu. I tried rolling back the physx/video card drivers to my vista setup, no difference. Tried all the regular stuff, shortcut flags, compatability modes etc. Nothing it working. I dont intend to play on w7 anyways just because I dont want to have to drastically alter my main os just for sacred. Just trying to resolve it in hopes of helping someone else in the future. Gonna keep at it and ill update as needed.

Im not much of a forum guy. I don't post in them at all on any sites so forgive me for being amateur. I hope this is helpful to someone. I went through a massive load of sh.. trying to get sacred 2 working. Im going to post about my experience and how I made it work. Lets start at the beginning. I play games pretty much only with my wife. Anyways the 2 computers we mainly use for gaming are as follows. HP(can run sacred2/ib forever w/o crashing) intel core 2 duo 6600 ati 5770 450w ps onboard sound windows vista sp2 x64 4gb ram saitek keyboard, standard mouse NEXT TO CURRENT ATI DRIVER AND OLD 8.X PHYSX Custom(going to call w7) asus px58d premium core i7 950 1000w ps ati 5970 nvidia gt430(just for physx using software hack) windows 7 home/p x64 12gb ram alienwarefx keyboard cyborg rat7 mouse ALL CURRENT DRIVERS/PHYSX 9.X BOTH RUNNING 22 IN MONS AT 1900X1080 I'm not sure if I left anything out, im not much of a techie so most of my troubleshooting was done my trial and error. Ok so the hp runs sacred 2 flawless, has never crashed, ever. Installed ice and blood, patched up to 2.65.1 remains flawless. Installed sacred 2 on the w7 pc, patched up, activated. Double clicked the icon, about 2 seconds later I saw the sacred icon in the taskbar, screen flashed black, and it was gone. Nothing happened. Opened task manager and tried again. Noticed sacred2.exe open, s2gs however did not. Screen flashed black, process ended. Started googling, saw that sacred 2 crashing was a major prob and tons of ppl were having it, which was good for me, because prolly a fix had already been made or a workaround found. Using official forums and DM forums, I started trying it all. Compatability modes on both sacred2.exe and s2gs.exe, adding flags to the shortcut, using 4gb patch on the exe, uninstalling, reinstalling using compatability. Nothing was working and sacreds debug.txt was showing nothing odd, it just ended during startup for apparently no reason. There were alot of workarounds and fixes that people had gotten to work but nothing was helping me at all. And to me it was obvious that windows 7 was the source of my probs. I tried updating to a certain patch and executing. Before installing ice and blood, double clicking would instantly pop a black screen and error window saying error:handleterminate. Installing ice and blood caused this error not to show and just flash black. I got ahold of securom, sent them my info. They told my my exe was ok and my problem wasnt securom related. At this point im about 10 hours in prob, mainly due to so many reinstall waits. I had exhausted pretty much every option/fix anyone had ever came up with except xp mode which I couldnt do because I dont have ultimate. Even then people complained of 1 hr crashes or having to run graphics on med etc. With nearly every answer pointing to XP mode or XP compatability I decided to pop in an old hd that had xp on it, first I would format, clean install, update, bring all drivers to current. Day 2 now, XPsp3 is running, sacred 2/IB installed. I double click the icon. SUCCESS! Sacred 2 opened, wierd graphical glitches during loading but it was opening hahaha now we can play! The alienware keyboard has a manager prob to change what color the backlight is of different parts of the keyboard. Sacred2 was causing the keyboard to go black on startup, and when attacked it would flash red, on level up it would go rainbow for a few seconds, low hp it would start beating green. This was very odd, and tbh very annoying, not only because it seemed siezure inducing, but im thinking, hmm driver conflict? 20 mins in, crash... ok no big she had alt tabbed, I already read about how this can crash it. Disabled keyboard manager and reopened started playing again, sacred2 doesnt care and keyboard remains in siezure mode, 10 mins later, porting into a cave, crash... I had also read that zoning in/out and porting can crash, I had just been hopeful that these crashes would be few and far between. 3rd attempt, 5 mins in, opening map crashes it. I give up, so much time already just to play a game right.. We quit and the next time im sitting there thinking wth! why does the hp run this game perfect and w7 cant catch a break even in freaking xp which seems from reading online to be your best bet, granted it could only recognize 3gb of the 12gb ram and the game was running maxed. So im thinking oooooh I bet it didnt have enough ram to be maxed, maybe running on med wouldnt have fixed it but at least prolonged the time between crashes. But I dont want to run it on med, we are graphics whores. I'm trying to think of what to do, running 2 os's seems a little extreme just to play an old game considering all the time I would spend formatting, installing, updating, installing Sacred 2 updating. However we both love Sacred 2 and I dont like to give up on anything, even if I have little knowledge about the situation. Day3 Im quite upset, the hp is sitting here with sacred now open for 3 days, mocking my efforts with its crash free lifestyle. So I get the idea to try and duplicate the hp. Why I didnt try this first I can only blame on the letters XP spammed on every single fix/workaround idea page I had looked at. I wipe the xp hard drive, installed my old vista sp2 x64, updated, installed chipset/lan/sound etc drivers. I did NOT install my video card drivers. I installed sacred, patched up, then IB, patched up. It was then that I noticed the hp did not have current ati drivers, nor did it have current physx, something even sacred2 developers had said to do first thing. Not saying they were wrong, everyone has dif issues, just saying. So I d/l the older 11.5 ati drivers/install, dl physx 8.x/install. I disable the nvidia card since I dont even know if there is a physx hack for vista nor do I care, because im copying the hp.(While reading it over I noticed I didnt mention that before trying xp or vista I had disabled the nvidia hack and card.) With vista installed the comp sees 12gb ram. Double click sacred2(using no flags, no compat, just straight up), it opens, but with some odd graphical glitching and I dont even see the loading screen. Im just at the main menu after like 3 seconds. I go max everything out and start a lan game, use a dragon mage since that what she was using, and I log in my high elf from the hp since thats what I was using, im making everything like it was during crashing just to test. I'm spamming M, casting, porting back and forth across the map while alt tabbing, spamming combo spells while alt tabbing, zoning in and out of the cave she crashed in while alt tabbing, im trying to put a massive strain on resources, more than anything though I want to know if this thing is gonna sneak a crash chain up on me while we are in the middle of playing. I do what I can to try and force a crash for about 30 mins. Then I just leave it sitting there open and walk away. I had read about a memory leak that can cause the game to crash after simply being open for a period of time. About 4 hours later we actually play, we play for an hour or so, crash free and quit. We dont close the game though, the next night the lan game has been open and running for around 30 hours, mostly tabbed during the day for net usage, etc. We play again for an hour or so then quit. After the game was left open and connected for about 4 days and my mind was satisfied that it had become invincible to crashing like the hp and I can close it and delete the stress from my brain. Since then we have played several more times. I sometimes leave it open sometimes I remember to close it 0.o After all the frustration I felt inclined to put this information somewhere that someone can find it. Most of the forums I read ended without the Original poster saying wether given ideas worked or not. I searched and searched and found nothing that could help me. If you google the handle:terminate error you get like 2 results, neither of them helpful. Almost no one was having my problem of the screen flash, they were all at least getting the game to crash during startup or crash during play. Much like mine did on XP. Sacred 2 official forums seem to be abandoned by admin/moderators, I registered a week ago and still never got confirmation or ability to post. I hope this information helps someone. Again, sorry its not more informative, im not much of a tech wizard.