T12, on a Mac! Noob.

[FredTrellis]

Hello. Thanks for reading.

With the Macbook Pro, I have Bootcamp - as the machine boots, you can point it to one of two partitions. Pointing it at a Windows XP partition - and I have a Windows machine, MacOs/HD Format not involved at all.


There are problems.

Any download, or any save operation, results in corrupted files. (It takes a long time, and when it next boots, there are messages revealing cross-links, and truncated first entries). One time, it lost my serial number - though why it should have been tampering with that when saving a route, I cannot begin to imagine.

Also, the TS12 inbuilt browser shows nothing. It remains a blue, otherwise empty screen. Making it full screen results in a badly-pixellated grey picture of boilerplate filling the screen.

Finishing the game hangs the machine. I suspect that it simply buggers the video card, which then cannot redraw the screen.

Other games (COD2, COD4, GTA SA) have all worked faultlessly.

If anyone can offer advice, it would be appreciated.

 

[WindWalkr]

Any download, or any save operation, results in corrupted files. (It takes a long time, and when it next boots, there are messages revealing cross-links, and truncated first entries).

This indicates severe problems with your machine, and is not related to Trainz. This may be software (a corrupted FAT32/NFTS partition on your HDD, which might be fixable using the Windows chkdsk tools) or might be a hard drive failure in progress. I would strongly recommend you rectify this problem before attempting to get Trainz working properly.

One time, it lost my serial number - though why it should have been tampering with that when saving a route, I cannot begin to imagine.

Entirely likely a side-effect of the above.

Also, the TS12 inbuilt browser shows nothing. It remains a blue, otherwise empty screen. Making it full screen results in a badly-pixellated grey picture of boilerplate filling the screen.

Not really sure about this one. This kind of behaviour might result if you've instructed the Windows firewall to block Trainz.

Finishing the game hangs the machine. I suspect that it simply buggers the video card, which then cannot redraw the screen.

What is 'finishing the game' ?

cheers,

chris

 

[FredTrellis]

Finish Game

Thanks for the reply!

Finish Game Means selecting "Finish Game" from Main Menu. Maybe I misquote: Is it 'Exit Game"? I cannot see it at the moment - it's on my other unbooted PC, I'm on the Mac. (It crashed, restarting it is painfully slow, because Windows is slower to start than OSX, and it will run chkdsk in any case, there having been a crash).

Exiting Driver hangs the machine, immediately.
Saving a Driver Session hangs the machine immediately.
Exiting Surveyor, saving the route, no problem.

Chkdsk runs automatically on next re-boot after a crash.
Otherwise, chkdsk never reveals a problem, nor (when booted into the Mac) does the Mac Disk Utility.

I conclude that any disc problems arise when are FAT problems, caused by the save routine in Driver. No other Win program exhibits this behaviour, so there may be something in the Trainz save routine which is a little unusual?

Inbuilt web browser is simply broken on my machine, and I don't see that being related to the FAT.

I will probably re-partition, re-install. Pain, though.

 

[WindWalkr]

I conclude that any disc problems arise when are FAT problems, caused by the save routine in Driver.

There is nothing that a normally privileged executable can do that will cause problems at the partition level. See above for the possible causes.

One alternative is that your disk problems are caused by the sudden shutdown of the OS (if that's what you mean by 'hang'/'crash' in the above.) In this case, you'll want to identify what's causing this shutdown. It is not normal behaviour for a modern OS to lock up completely (as opposed to an application crashing, which is just as normal as ever..) If you're experiencing complete lock-ups then you should be on the lookout for driver or hardware faults.

chris

 

[FredTrellis]

KTHX

Thanks for the replies and the heads up.

Best regards, Fred.

 

[FredTrellis]

Yeah - I just thought I'd update you with my ignorance, and apologise for wasting your time.

I reckon the partition was too small, the HD was thrashing trying to get everything saved, paging files, and all that nonsense. No HD light on a Mac.........

Re-partioned an extra 10 GB - everything hunky dory (saving is slow, but it happens). Converted fat32 to NTFS as well - launch and load is much nippier.

Browser still not working.

But having fun! Thanks for the help.