Starcraft System Crash

I'm casting them aside as an unrelated user specific issue which is probably hardware related. However, The friend who created DFDD went from windows XP (Starcraft working fine) to windows 7 (starcraft freezing at random), So im fairly certain my assumptions are correct.

Not to place my circle of friends on a pedestal, but... compared to the regular starcraft gamers, these guys are in their own league (emudevs, game designers, game devs, Reviewers, and R.E'ers, etc). So when these guys are getting exactly the same issues after an upgrade to Win7, then im convinced its not a hardware fault.

Besides.
It spans, single core Sempron-LE, AMD Athlon x2 mobile, Intel Core 2, and Core i7, all of which run it perfectly on a previous XP install or current XP dualboot. The only Vista install i ever had access to also ran it perfectly fine.

because it happens on x32 as well

XPMode doesn't allow display mode switching.

besides, theres a fix for every issue, just have to find the cause first.
and since it only occurs in fullscreen, then that must mean its related to how ddraw is locking the screen, or something interfering with that locking.

You don't need to switch display modes since Windows 7 has the zoom-in feature. And I'm not talking about Windows XP Mode, I'm talking about VMware Player running Windows XP. Keep in mind that VMware can import your vhd from Windows XPM.

Everything is working perfectly.

I tried the VMWare route. It crashed too.

Unless there is a workaround for the graphics bug I believe the only hope is for the Koreans in mass to raise a stink. Then Microsoft might issue a patch or Blizzard might issue a patch. You can understand Microsoft being unwilling to jeopardize the win7 release with a change for a 10 year old game. And Blizzard is focusing on Softcraft 2.

squall leonhart said:

Its not hardware related. Its entirely a issue within Windows 7.
The fixes that worked on Vista are not working on Windows 7 at all.

A friend of mine that was working on an app to fix the colour issues (by pausing the explorer thread on start and unpausing on exit) is able to reproduce the issues in most of his DirectDraw games, Warcraft 2 BNE, Starcraft, Age of empires, Fallout, Worms,

Others have reproduced these problems on RCT and Pharaoh.

The issues did not occur under XP or Vista to the extent they are under Windows 7.

BTW, the colour fixer has been (or will be) released in a short while. unfortunately my friend has gone back to XP as it runs all these games fine.

Affinity does not fix it
disabling DWM does not fix it.
Uninstalling drivers does not fix it
Compatibility options do not fix it.

It seems that the issues are caused by Race issues created when Microsoft added WDDM updates to DirectDraw overlay.

atlas01 said:

I tried the VMWare route. It crashed too.

VMware might take a while to get used to but it integrates just like XPM once you have VMware tools set up. There's no way it doesn't work unless some settings are wrong. Also, when starcraft is running, you have to click Ctrl + Alt to input to your desktop or the colors will become weird. Also, be sure to increase your virtual RAM here.

Squall, I'll admit that your friends sound much more computer-intensive than I am, but I still find it hard to believe that I can go from a 32 bit, 7 year old OS, switch to a 64 bit OS, and still have the exact same kinds of problems.

I notice in your fix you mention something about your friends figuring out how to make it work by running it on a virtual XP machine. I think this works because it forces the game to run in a sort of window mode.

I use chaoslauncher, a Starcraft tool that allows you to load .dlls, and if I run SC in Window mode, it works just fine. I can't adjust the window size, so I end up putting SC on my right monitor and scaling the resolution up to 800x600, but it gets the job done.

I don't really consider this a "fix" so I never bother mentioning it, but yeah, ANYTHING that prevents SC from running in full screen should keep it from crashing.