Balls of Steel problems

[gmB]

I'm using XP Pro with SP2 and the latest patches.
Balls Of Steel works fine when I select the scrolling table view but will crash everytime when it tries to load the table in single screen view. There's an error message that goes like:
"Application Error:
The instruction at abc referenced memory at xyz.
The memory could not be written."

I tried it with BOS Version 1.2 and 1.3 which gave the same result. I tried the various compatibility modes, of course.
Version 1.0 won't run at all.

Anyone who encountered the same problem? Are there fixes?

[Reckless]

Yeah, had the same problem (amongst others!). Thread here - http://forums.3drealms.com/ubbthreads/sh...p;page=2#990264

I've found the game is not that playable under XP. e-mailed the developers and didn't get anything back (no, not even a "can't help you" response). I even downloaded their latest 'engine' pinball games and had similar issues with that so I really did expect a response to a technical query with their latest games! Pretty sad but not unusual these days Mark them down as a company who don't care and are therefore not one to be support!

[Jeffrey18]

hello,

i have balls of steel running on xp, i have update it to 1.3.

but if i start a pinball table, the game is always hanging!

i have set it to windows 2000 it runs under windows 2000.

maby the options to high or what??

sorry for my engelish its not so good.
greets jeffrey

[JR Ewing]

I'm pretty sure BOS was a DOS game, so if you have the computer power to run BOS in DosBox, that would be your best solution. XP can be unpredictable with games programmed in DOS.

On another note, something about the title of this thread struck me humorous. Maybe the fact that it's Monday, I'm tired, trying to recover from a long weekend, has something to do with it

[Rellik66]

Originally Posted by JR Ewing

I'm pretty sure BOS was a DOS game, so if you have the computer power to run BOS in DosBox, that would be your best solution. XP can be unpredictable with games programmed in DOS.

Nope, BOS is a Windows Game.

From the Balls of Steel game page:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• Pentium 100Mhz (133 recommended)
• Microsoft Windows 95 (or 98) with DirectX v3.0 (or higher)
• 16Mb of memory
• 1Mb VESA compatible SVGA display card
• DirectX compatible sound card
• 2X CD-ROM drive
• 70Mb hard drive space

[JR Ewing]

I stand corrected.

[Joe Siegler]

There is another tech problem with BOS we can't currently fix. Pressing F2 on our computers here at 3DR ingame will cause it to crash. We're attempting to get a fix from Wildfire, but if we can't, we'll have to discontinue it, which Ireally didn't want to do.

[Rellik66]

Odd, it doesn't crash on me when I press F2.

I have had it freeze on the Duke table occasionally though... :/

XP SP2/ATI AIW 8500/Athlon 64...BTW...

[Scotty]

Originally Posted by Joe Siegler

There is another tech problem with BOS we can't currently fix. Pressing F2 on our computers here at 3DR ingame will cause it to crash. We're attempting to get a fix from Wildfire, but if we can't, we'll have to discontinue it, which Ireally didn't want to do.

I don't have a backup path for regression testing, but BOS and Devil's Island stopped working for me in the last 2-3 months.

As there is usually a big batch of XP updates every month, it probably woudn't be too hard to deduce which update broke BOS/DI if I had time to throw in a blank hard disk, reformat, install all updates through 9/2005, verify that BOS/DI works, and then install updates one at a time until BOS/DI breaks.

There were also two point upgrades to DirectX 9.0c (in December and April). I doubt that was the cause, as neither required a reboot.

I wish I'd caught this when I was on vacation back in April, as I would've had the time to mess around with this.

[Zebius]

For me BOS with patch 1.3 is not working since I installed Service Pack 2 for XP. When choosing table I got typical error message: ...Memory could not be read... bla bla bla

I hope somebody will fix it because this is my favourite pinball.

[Jeffrey18]

sorry to say, but i have remove BOS!! i cant play it on my computer

bring a patch out sooooooon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Jeffrey18]

ok,

here some image`s. ZOOM IN (LEFT CLICK ON IMAGE)

if i want to shoot the bal its not respons directly! but after 1/2/3 sec.

if i push the left shift, or the right shift,its not respons directly! but after 1/2/3 sec. sometimes 7sec. ------>http://img118.imageshack.us/my.php?i...fsteel10lv.jpg

(problem whit te screen!!)

here the options ingame------> http://img118.imageshack.us/my.php?i...ofsteel3qv.jpg

(something to high??)

here i show you that i run it under win 2000------> http://img379.imageshack.us/my.php?i...fsteel24ib.jpg

(evrything good??)

and here my system------> http://img379.imageshack.us/my.php?i...fsteel31jo.jpg

please help i want to play BOS normal!!

[Scotty]

The "Delayed response" is an old problem. It started for me several years ago (whenever XP SP1 was released). Switching to 98/ME compatibility fixed that one for me.

An intermittent problem I've had is inability to write to the registry (usually when this happens, all the high scores show up as 10,000 or whatever the default was). Either running BOS as an administrator, or using an administrator account to grant "Full Control" to the "Users" group to the BOS keys/subkeys/values in HKLM in the registry clears that one.

My next vacation probably won't be until August, so it will be awhile until I determine which XP patch/hotfix is stopping me from running BOS and DI. On my system, I was able to run BOS and DI after XP SP2 was released, so I suspect it was a later patch/hotfix that caused the problem.

[Jeffrey18]

ok, i have try to make BOS work under window 98/me. it works great!! the bal is not fast, and the flippers are not stuck.

but now is the sound not good ""he he he he"

Problem 1: The sound effects are garbled, and/or the music stutters.

OR

Problem 2: The sound effects are "scratchy".

heeeeee now that problem ****ed

how to fix this ??

ow, i forgot something to say.

if i press F2: Cycles the table view: Single Screen it will crash

[Jeffrey18]

yeah i have it to!!

is there a fix for?????

i have kiss pinball to and thats working great on xp and single screen

[Joe Siegler]

Originally Posted by gmB

I'm using XP Pro with SP2 and the latest patches.
Balls Of Steel works fine when I select the scrolling table view but will crash everytime when it tries to load the table in single screen view. There's an error message that goes like:
"Application Error:
The instruction at abc referenced memory at xyz.
The memory could not be written."

I tried it with BOS Version 1.2 and 1.3 which gave the same result. I tried the various compatibility modes, of course.
Version 1.0 won't run at all.

Anyone who encountered the same problem? Are there fixes?

There is no known fix. Unfortunately, this is the problem that may lead to the game being discontinued.

Also, there were three current threads for Balls of Steel problems - that isn't necessary, I merged them all into this one.

[Jeffrey18]

ok thats fine.

uum can you make a fix??

oo i want to play bos its sow a fantasic game!!

ok i have try it again:

if i start a table the sound is not good! if i push F2 for single screen, it crash and i have good sound hahahahahaha this is so funny.

god damn why not ingame thats what i need god damn it

[akula65]

I wouldn't hold my breath with regard to Joe's request for a patch from Wildfire. In late 2003 you could download patches for their programs from the Wildfire site as you can see from this page on the Wayback Machine (the Wayback Machine has problems with ASP pages, so you can't see the clickable links any more):

http://web.archive.org/web/200312261...p?name=Patches

There is currently no patch support for any of these programs on the Wildfire site, so it's pretty obvious that they are only interested in supporting the currently available download versions of games they have developed. This supports what Reckless said earlier in this thread.

Most people probably don't even realize that there is a patch for the CD-ROM version of Devil's Island Pinball since neither Wildfire nor any of the major download sites have it available for download anymore.

[Scotty]

If I remember correctly, the Devil's Island 110 patch works for both the CD and download versions.

The file I have is "devils_110.exe", 368k, downloaded way back on 4-May-2001, which predates Windows XP RTM.

[oak man]

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

* Pentium 100Mhz (133 recommended)
* Microsoft Windows 95 (or 98) with DirectX v3.0 (or higher)
* 16Mb of memory
* 1Mb VESA compatible SVGA display card
* DirectX compatible sound card
* 2X CD-ROM drive
* 70Mb hard drive space

" 70Mb of hard drive space?! Thats insane!!"
I remember saying that when I saw it back then

[Mok]

I have created an unofficial patch 1.3a for Balls of Steel. Any daring person can try to see if it fixes problems with resolution switching Requires retail game already patched to v1.3. The patch is here: http://strony.aster.pl/mokmtg/BOS13to13a.exe (167 KB)
Tested only on my machine: XP Pro SP2 (32-bit), Athlon 64x2 4400+ with 2GB RAM and Geforce 6800 GT.

Have fun,
-Mok

[Zebius]

Siema

Thanks a lot, man! I don't know how did you do that, but it really works!
My wife will be happy, BOS is the only PC game she used to play. And since installing Service Pack 2 she couldn't play it 'cause the game crashed after clicking Play button.
My machine is: XPHome SP2, Athlon 2800+, GeForce 6600GT AGP.

Thanks once again

EDIT: BOS runs too fast on my machine (before it was the same). My solution to that is to run Windows Media Player (I've got 10.0 version) before launching the game and keep it running while playing BOS, speed of the gameplay is almost normal then

[Mok]

I used to have speed problems but now it works perfectly. Make sure you don't disable vsync in your gfx driver. Also I have driver-forced 85hz refresh rate for all the typical video modes (640x480, 800x600 and so on) as maybe the profiler runs in one videomode and the actual game in another. Just remember that after tweaking the driver settings you probably need to run Reprof.exe in BOS directory to clear the old speed values and allow the game to profile your hardware again.

[Zebius]

Thanks for your reply.
I struggled with that speed problem before and here is what I noticed:

No matter what I set in drivers settings (v-sync on/off, force refresh rate for various resolutions) the game always sets refresh rate to 62 or 63. I checked these values in registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE / Wildfire Studios / Balls of Steel / Display Profile), manual modifying this value gives nothing - the game always come back to 62/63. I used reprofiler to reset game settings before changing any drivers' settings.
Higher refresh rates in drivers always give too fast gameplay.
When lowering refresh rate in drivers - gameplay speed becomes slower, with 70Hz it is just a little too fast but quite playable. 60Hz is too jerky.

So far that trick with Windows Media Player works the best for me

[Joe Siegler]

Originally Posted by Mok

I have created an unofficial patch 1.3a for Balls of Steel. Any daring person can try to see if it fixes problems with resolution switching Requires retail game already patched to v1.3. The patch is here: http://strony.aster.pl/mokmtg/BOS13to13a.exe (167 KB)
Tested only on my machine: XP Pro SP2 (32-bit), Athlon 64x2 4400+ with 2GB RAM and Geforce 6800 GT.

Have fun,
-Mok

What exactly did you do? Send me some details of what this does, please.

[Mok]

The original directdraw rendering code is wrong. The game prepares a primary surface (so it's size is exactly as video mode resolution, usually 800x600 pixels) and an additional one which is bigger than the 1st one. Then it draws to both surfaces using resolution of the 2nd one. This causes page faults as primary surface is too small. I have added additional code that stores height of the locked surface and modified drawing code to check if it's not going to draw too far.

[Joe Siegler]

Can I get you to send me this code via email, so we can look at it? THanks.

[Mok]

I can, but are you sure you want it? I have no source of the game so the changes are all in assembler, applied directly to the executables of each table. It's useless if you have the sources.

[Joe Siegler]

Originally Posted by Mok

I can, but are you sure you want it? I have no source of the game so the changes are all in assembler, applied directly to the executables of each table. It's useless if you have the sources.

Yes, I still would like to see what you did. We might be able to adapt the fix.

[Scotty]

It looks like this may be more of a driver problem than an SP2 problem:

I just did a clean install of XP Pro SP1 and ATI Catalyst 6.5, Windows 98/ME compatibility enabled, and I'm having problems.

I have not applied Service Pack 2, any Windows Updates, or DirectX updates.

Scrolling view at 800x600 works for both BOS and Devil's Island (download version).

Single screen does not work at any resolution for either game.

I don't have the boxed version of DI, so I can't check to see if 1024x768 scrolling works. Although it's possible to select 1600x1200 scrolling in DI Download, this ends up playing as a single screen.

If I have time, I'll try installing older Catalyst versions to find where the break happened.

UPDATE: I'm back to normal operation with Catalyst 5.13 (last version of Catalyst 5).

If there was a change between Catalyst 5 and Catalyst 6 that affected DirectDraw, it could explain at least some of the problems.

Hitting F2 cycles Scrolling/Auto/Fixed, which could cause the problem for anyone that normally uses the Scrolling view.

UPDATE: After applying Windows Updates not included in XP SP2, I started having slow/stuttering sound problems in both BOS 1.3 and DI 1.1. Switching from "Auto" to "DirectSound" had no effect. Switching to "Wave Mapper" made it worse.

After switching off Windows 98/ME compatibility, everything worked correctly again from my Administrator account. This is the first time in several years that I haven't had input-lag issues when running without compatibility.

As BOS and DI were intended to run on Windows 9x, one of the following is necessary:

• Use an Administrator account
• Use Windows 98/ME compatibility
• Edit the permissions of "\\HKLM\Software\Wildfire Studios" to allow "Full Control" for the "Users" and "Power Users" groups, using the Advanced button to apply those permissions to all child objects

As compatibility no longer appears to work (at least in my environment) I ended up editing the permissions of that branch of the registry. From a support standpoint, it may be more practical to advise use of an Administrator account.

[Mok]

Yesterday gfx card in my main machine died so I installed the game on my 2nd one (single-core A64 3500+ cpu with an old Radeon 9100) and the game is completely unplayable. I need to press a key for 2 seconds before it responds. This is definitely a priority problem and I'll prepare a 2nd version of my unofficial patch that will fix it at least partially. I will post it here when it's done.

Ok, new version of the patch is here:
http://strony.aster.pl/mokmtg/BOS13to13b.exe

Try it, if you have problems with keyboard/speed. The game was setting realtime priority for one of it's threads which is a bit too much... I changed it to high priority and now it works pretty good on my 2nd machine.

[Litude]

This is great! The game was completely unplayable for me as it took around two seconds for the flippers to respond when I pressed a key and now they work perfectly! For me there seems to be no problems left in the game anymore, thanks to your patches, I can play it without trouble on Windows XP

[Another Duke Fan]

The link to the patch is dead. Anyone, please repost!

[Mok]

Oops, I forgot to update the info with the latest (probably the last one) version. It's here:
http://strony.aster.pl/mokmtg/BallsOfSteel13c.exe

Unfortunately this version will not install on top of my previous patches, you need v1.3 to apply it. The list of all changes:
- fixed 1 additional directdraw function that I left unchanged previously.
- Monitor refresh rate profiler replaced with a different version. The old one sometimes reported wrong values resulting in too fast gameplay (just like Zebius reported - instead of real refreshrate it was reporting 63-64 Hz).
- added short delay after showing help page so it won't disappear immediately after pressing F1.
- the game won't modify process/thread priorities anymore. This might produce unwanted results if you run other things in the background. OTOH it won't delay/kill your important processes while you play.
- sound engine replaced with a newer version. Latest version of Seal engine produces less noise especially in Wavemapper mode.
- fixed a bug in the menu executable (BOS.exe) that freed memory used by a initial sound without stopping it's playback. This caused crash in Vista (not that the game works in Vista, but it's still a bug).
- the menu will no longer switch the desktop resolution to 640x480 as it causes some unwanted window resizing etc. If you want to keep it like before, just backup BOS.exe before applying the patch and restore it later.

Ok, and a bit off-topic but I made similar patches for several other games based on BOS pinball engine. I posted links on some pinball msgboard if anyone is interested (Devil's Island, Kiss Pinball etc.):
http://www.pcpinball.com/msgboard/ms...l?post_id=5329

[Zebius]

PERFECT!!!

It works great for me.
I don't need compatibility mode to play BoS on XP anymore, and my problems with speed of gameplay have gone away I used the hint posted at these forums by Xantheous once (originally written by Joel Finch from Wildfire Studios):

" The simplest way to test if the game is running abnormally fast is to
start the Darkside table, and time how long it takes for the entire
starting dotpanel sequence to cycle through - this includes the version
number display, the title, the basic instructions, and all of the high scores.

If the game is running at the correct speed, the time should be around 61
seconds, give or take a few. If it running through in 30 seconds or so,
then the game is definitely running fast."

I got 60 seconds, so all is perfect now.

Thanks a lot for this patch. I think it should become official patch ASAP.

[Another Duke Fan]

Mok, you did it!!! Since years me and many others were dreaming to get BOS working without any chance for success. Although I never uninstalled it, I almost gave up. And now, you just did it!! It works fantastic! Thank you so much for bringing the joy back to me for playing one of the most fun flipper games ever!

[Litude]

You must be really skilled with ASM if you managed to do all these changes without access to the source code! I wonder whether it would be possible to center the menu on the screen? Not that it's neccessary but if you're using a high resolution it looks a bit off being there in the upper corner.

I agree with Zebius that this should be made into an official patch so that it will become more widespread, and no more people will start complaining about the game being broken!

[Joe Siegler]

We can NEVER make an official patch off of unknown code from the public like that. I've been trying to get Wildfire to fix the game for a bit now, but am not getting much of anywhere with it, unfortunately.

[Rassilon]

Mok, would you beable to make a version for the demo version of the game?
I tried to use your latest patch and this was the result:

"This program cannot update the installed version of Balls of Steel because of the following reason: C:\Games\Balls of Steel DEMO v1.3\barbarin.ddp: file missing."

[Mok]

Sure. It's for version 1.3 of the demo.
http://strony.aster.pl/mokmtg/BallsOfSteelDemo13a.exe