[H] Windows 7 still freezes BW

On February 01 2010 19:17 liosama wrote:
sc lags for me as well. Every 10 seconds I get a random microsecond skip. Annoys the absolute shit out of me. I basically cant play any game without setting it to Extra High Latency which still lags as well

On February 01 2010 19:28 IceCube wrote:

That may or may not (most likely) be the problem with Win 7. The problem on this thread is Win 7 + Winamp + SC = crash, no lag issues revealed. And there is no solution to this problem to this date. Your problem liosama might be with your internet connection/proxy which does not affect Win 7 crash, and therefore I suggest using search option to try and find solution to your problem.

On February 02 2010 09:54 blabber wrote:

I would put more blame on Microsoft and Windows 7

Best fix for all this and to fix windows 7 freezing i've used is as follows. I've been using this for ages and ages weeks on iccup and have played nearly 70 games this season day to day and its working without freezing anymore.

make a .bat file with this in it:

cmd.exe /C start /affinity 1 C:\"Program Files\ICCup\Launcher"\"Launcher.exe"
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 2
taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 2
cd C:\Games\Starcraft\
rem cmd.exe /C start /affinity 1 C:\Games\Starcraft\StarCraft.exe
rem Wait for the game to quit, press Enter to continue
pause
start explorer.exe
exit

The batch file should use windows compatibility mode for XP sp3 and 640x480 resolution the rest doesn't matter.

But!
In starcraft because everyone has multi core systems now but the tricky thing is windows 7 is a bit different in that under Speed - Enable CPU Throttling disable this not enable even though it sound like it should be helpful it does the opposite in windows 7.

Also under Video: Enable Color Cycling should be OFF (this means water doesn't change color and stuff nothing important)
And Disable Unit Portraits.

So, use a batchfile setting affinity to your 1st core for Iccup launcher which in turn makes starcraft only use the 1st core as you use the Launcher to launch starcraft not manually.
This disable CPU throttling as we set the affinity ourselves and it would only cause crashes.
Now turn off Color Cycling & Unit Portraits.

All this and in Windows 7 on a dual core Intel I stopped crashing completely. I used to crash all the time and tested all the combinations of things and all these seem to make it fine. You can tab in and out as much as you like, your resolution will switch fine to your normal desktop resolution i.e. I use 1900x1200. I even use dual monitors and put stuff on my second monitor like films or youtube or desktop gadgets and its fine.

Only unit portraits 'might' be alright to turn back on but I didn't test as I never cared about it anyways.
Anyways enjoy.

Note: The pings to yourself are just for a delay to allow explorer to completely close as an indication before you should launch starcraft. I tested the 98/Me compatibility but it causes a problem with connecting to Iccup and stuff iirc. That 98/Me would fix the colors by itself but do it in the above way for the most stable solution I've experienced.

On February 07 2010 05:24 hasuprotoss wrote:
Best fix I've found (courtesy of http://www.iccup.com/warcraft/forum/general_forum/starcraft_forum_/83879/page1.html)



Mine hasn't crashed, had weird colors, or done anything funky since I began using this file.

On February 07 2010 08:39 mOnion wrote:


mkay, for those of us on TL who ARENT cs majors, can someone explain exactly how to do this .bat and coding stuff? i dont know enough about the problem to apply the solution X_X

On February 07 2010 08:56 blabber wrote:


I personally would like to hear R1CH or someone's opinion on this before thinking this is the end-of-all-problems solution

On February 02 2010 10:05 R1CH wrote:
It is as much Blizzard's fault as Microsoft's, SC should have been updated a long time ago to do proper 32 bit rendering say, oh 10 years ago when everyone had video cards that could do more than 256 colors. How many other programs designed to Windows 95 specifications do you run on a daily basis?

It's very surprising that Blizzard doesn't really support SC any more despite its huge fan base, I guess WoW is the only product they pay much attention to since it brings in monthly revenue. It really shouldn't be that much work to change the rendering to use the desktop color depth.

On February 02 2010 10:05 R1CH wrote:
It is as much Blizzard's fault as Microsoft's, SC should have been updated a long time ago to do proper 32 bit rendering say, oh 10 years ago when everyone had video cards that could do more than 256 colors. How many other programs designed to Windows 95 specifications do you run on a daily basis?

It's very surprising that Blizzard doesn't really support SC any more despite its huge fan base, I guess WoW is the only product they pay much attention to since it brings in monthly revenue. It really shouldn't be that much work to change the rendering to use the desktop color depth.

On February 07 2010 09:16 theconartist wrote:
God its hilarious to see you guys theorize about things you have no clue about.

I've had fun playing Starcraft on Windows 7 for almost 6 months now without a hitch. Wanna know the only difference between you and me? Driver versions. I'm not saying you haven't tried updating or whatever but it really isn't microsoft's, blizzards, or ati/nvidia's fault. It's just an old game and its impossible for the people writing the drivers to test for every possible combination of software.

Now I get to sit back and laugh even more as 100 noobs cry about this post while pretending they know what they are talking about.

On February 07 2010 10:46 frozenkatkiller wrote:


Read the link I posted. What the problem is has already been established and that is not it.

On February 07 2010 08:55 iCCup.Raelcun wrote:


Open notepad copy the ENTIRE section in the CODE window into the notepad. Under File click save as, change the file type from text file to all formats then type in a name like "Kill.bat" as long as it has the .bat at the end of it. Save it and run it.

On April 24 2010 13:42 jiabung wrote:
thanks!
one more quick question.
When the command prompt is running, everything else disappears so I don't have access to any other programs until I quit SC. Is this normal?

Wouldn't installing XP on a Virtualbox work as well as being simpler than dualbooting?

Wouldn't installing XP on a Virtualbox work as well as being simpler than dualbooting? has anyone tested this?

It works, but mouse response and feeling a bit awkward.

On July 06 2010 06:04 blabber wrote:

running SC switches your desktop to Basic anyway, does it not?

On August 25 2010 02:55 HaruHaru wrote:
I'm having trouble running this on windows 7 64 bit on vmware fusion. Whenever i start the game i just get a black screen :/ I tried adding the bat file but it doesnt seem to have an affect! Whats going on!?

On September 27 2010 05:55 seRapH wrote:

the problem with window mode is that its tiny, drastically decreases mouse accuracy, and just generally annoying to play with.

On September 27 2010 05:57 buhhy wrote:


You can 2x the window size. It makes a big difference.

On September 27 2010 07:17 seRapH wrote:
when i 2x the top and bottom goes off the screen, making my resource count off screen and the bottom part of my minimap gone, basically unplayable.

On February 01 2010 16:48 Kinky wrote:
If you're using a multi-core CPU, have you tried making it so that the Starcraft.exe process is only running on one core? I never seem to crash when I do that.

On September 28 2010 00:20 By.Pato wrote:

this is like the third time I hear this and it makes perfect sense, but how u do that?

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

ICCUP Launcher:
Chaos Plugin - checked
Lan Latency - checked
Window mode - unchecked

Starcraft.exe compatibility options:
Force 640x480 resolution - checked
Run as Administrator - checked
Everything else - unchecked

ddhack.cfg contents:
altwinpos

On October 02 2010 20:33 Metaspace wrote:
This fix (DDHack) seems to work, but I cannot get into Battle.net with it!
When trying to enter battle.net, first, I got a message from battle.net that the application version cannot be determined (kicking me).

Now (??) the game switches back to the desktop (in low resolution) and nothing more happens the moment I try to connect with battle.net, and I have to kill it using task manager.

Any ideas?

On October 03 2010 01:53 Metaspace wrote:
Update: You do not need "altwinpos" in DDHack's config, force Vsync to off in your display driver.
With this, I do not get the "back to desktop" problem when trying to connect to Bnet;

Instead, I (again) get "..was unable to properly identify your application version [...] you may have a computer virus [...]" from Bnet.
Seems like the DDHack dll's presence causes this...any workaround?

This way I at least get into ICCup.

On October 06 2010 00:47 Metaspace wrote:
And yes, not being able to get into Bnet sucks toally, I regularely play casual games with a number of friends there that do not play ICCup, as well as quality 3v3 hunters games.

On October 07 2010 18:16 Metaspace wrote:
As far as I can see it, Blizzard could patch BW to tolerate DDHack, or change graphics to output to, i.e., 16bit color in a wrapper around the original output.

Of course Microsoft could get their shit together and publish a proper backward compatible DirectDraw dll

On October 08 2010 14:43 TheWa11 wrote:
I was having the same problem with broodwar on windows 7 and i turned on 'enable cpu threading' in the speed settings. I haven't crashed since :D

Try this out, I hope this works for everyone else.

On October 09 2010 10:13 ArvickHero wrote:
I can't change the core affinity settings when I launch the game w/ the ICCup Launcher ;l any way around this?

On October 02 2010 22:56 Metaspace wrote:
vek, do you still manage to get into ICCup?
I use Win7 Professional 64 bit BTW.

On October 08 2010 14:43 TheWa11 wrote:
I was having the same problem with broodwar on windows 7 and i turned on 'enable cpu threading' in the speed settings. I haven't crashed since :D

Try this out, I hope this works for everyone else.

On October 22 2010 01:12 2Pacalypse- wrote:
- After some testing, it became public that DirectDraw hack indeed works well with BW, with some minor modifications. Squall_Leonhart69r again reported that DDhack works fine with Starcraft as long as you set Vertical synch (vsync) to Force off in Video card control panel. Also, you must add altwinpos option in config.ini file of DDhack.

Have you guys tried using the registry fix instead of taskilling explorer.exe every time you play SC? Just curious.
+ Show Spoiler +

On October 22 2010 17:19 Metaspace wrote:
I wonder how SCBW checks it's own integrity when connecting to Bnet; interestingly enough, this does not happen when connecting to ICCup.

Assumption: SCBW calculates a checksum over it's loaded code (including loaded DLLs), then transmits this to the server upon connect - the server then checks this number, and disconnects you if not correct.

If my hypothesis is right, one would either have to know how the checksum (or whatever) is calculated, and get DDHack to behave identical in context of this check (might not be possible as it has different code), or hack SCBW to always send the code Bnet expects.

The latter method is surely easier, requires a packet sniffer, transmission anaylsis, and finally a plugin which hijacks data sending during connect.
My best bet is that people like the ChaosLauncher devs might have the skills to do so!

On November 02 2010 17:07 Metaspace wrote:
Update: SCBW will not run (using DDHack.dll) on ICCup for me (I cannot connect to battle.net at all this way, see above).

Very often within the game, my mouse will become trapped at the top edge of the screen, where I can move it right/left, but not downwards anymore.

Using alt+tab to switch to the desktop and back alleviates this, but you can imagine that this does not really help my micro.

Any experience with this?

On November 02 2010 18:34 vek wrote:


Have you changed to contents of your ddhack.cfg to only contain "altwinpos"?
Doing this solved the problems you mentioned for me.

On October 22 2010 17:10 Metaspace wrote:

Correction: At least for my machine, you either use the "altwinpos" option in the DDHack config, or you force vsync off. The former does not allow me to attempt to connect to Bnet or ICCup etc., but the latter does (SCBW switches to another resolution for the connect window, I assume, which is messed up ba altwinpos on my machine).

On November 16 2010 20:56 squall leonhart wrote:
I came across this, this is something i have not spotted nor tried before

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980731

On November 16 2010 01:06 squall leonhart wrote:


Your mistaking the issues.

Vsync off prevents the mouse stuttering, which was a side effect of the frames polling higher then the refresh rate.

altwinpos prevents the mouse from being locked to the top of the screen from start, a alt+tab fixes this for some, but for others it does not. This has the side effect of causing certain backgrounds to be black and especially the battlenet text and buttons.

As for its effects on servers, most BNE's allow you to connect and login fine, if anything iccup is doing more checks then others and failing due to the load order of the dll's?

The freeze is most definitely an issue with DirectDraw on Windows 7, though for what reason im still trying to find out, the person i was working on this with got bored and so did i for awhile there (just wanted to play some games).

The strange thing is, while the freeze occurs in most DirectDraw only titles as a full system lock, titles which support DirectDraw and Direct3D7 (MS Starlancer), only occurs as a application lockup and can be end tasked, though task manager can only be raised from the ctrl+alt+delete task screen.

I also reproduced a full application hang right from start in Eduke32 in classic renderer, which happens to use DirectDraw, which was unlike both the Starcraft, and starlancer issue, and again found that Age of Empires 2 will not freeze at all once you get into a game.

On November 16 2010 20:56 squall leonhart wrote:
I came across this, this is something i have not spotted nor tried before

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980731

On December 19 2010 23:55 2Pacalypse- wrote:
DDHack unfortunately doesn't work on Bnet (yeah I know, "play iccup" blablabla...).

Here's a good workaround to make your Starcraft work on Windows 7:

1. Enable Window Mode in Chaoslauncher.

2. Change your Windows resolution to 640x480 and position your Starcraft in Window mode so it fits the screen perfectly.

3. Use Alt + F1 to lock your cursor inside Starcraft window, so you can scroll normally in game. Also use Alt + F11 to keep Starcraft on top of other windows, in case Taskbar is showing on top of SC.

4. In case you can only change your resolution to 800x600 in Display Settings, click Advanced and go to Adapter settings. There find "List all modes" option and click it (if you can't find it in Adapter tab, look around, it should be there somewhere). When you find all modes, choose the one where it says "640 by 480, True Color (32bit), xx Hz" (note: choose highest number of xx you find).

On December 20 2010 04:35 MaRiNe23 wrote:


Um what's the difference between doing this and just playing on windowed mode regularly besides the fact that your clear of distractions? I don't really understand how this is a fix becuz we still can't get sc to play on full screen :x

On December 19 2010 19:23 writer22816 wrote:
Using DDHack with no problems, fixed colors and crashing. Set it to altwinpos and disable vsync, iccup works fine. I highly doubt that anyone who is still having problems has tried out DDHack while following all the instructions. You're welcome to prove me wrong though.