Systematic crash on win2k solved

[totatis]

Hi,

I had systematic crashes when I ran the emulator on win2k. After many attempts, I've finally managed to run it. Maybe this solution should be added to the FAQ.

On my computer, I don't have a real CD drive, juste hard drives. And when i ran the emulator with a CD image, I had a systematic NULL pointer crash. The solution is to run TWO cd-images programs, ie Alcohol 120 AND Daemon Tools. Any one of these alone will result in crash, while having BOTH installed makes chankast happy.
I'm guessing that this is due to chankast being confused by only one CD drive.

The computer is up to date wrt drivers, service packs, updates, aspi drivers, directx, whatever. I've tried uninstalling anyone of these, and the emulator will crash again. The only solution is to have both applications installed and running.

I know my configuration is not the most usual, but I think this solution could apply to other people without real cd drive, so I thought I should share. Don't know if the problem belongs to aspi drivers or to chankast, but it works.

 

[PsyMan]

It seems that the emulator tries to detect your CD-ROM drive but since virtual drives use different ways to handle memory the emulator fails and then crashes. By installing two programs that create virtual drives you managed to trick each other so that they think that a real CD-ROM drive is present and change their configuration.

The programs that create virtual drives try to mimic the behavior of real drives but weren't designed for use without real drives. As a result they may not work correctly and there might be problems with some CD-ROM depended applications.

Since your problem was very unique and does not affect anyone who has a *normal* computer (I mean a computer with CD-ROM, hard disk, monitor, mainboard, CPU, etc.) I don't think that it has to be added to the FAQ. This does not mean that your info is not useful for someone who may have the same problem (at least I'll keep this info myself in mind in case I try to remove my CD-ROM drive ).