Quake3World

Okay, so I've been playing Quake3 for a while now, and I've just started encountering a problem with punkbuster.

Whenever I join a PB server, the game goes fine for about 45 seconds, then bluescreens or kicks me back to the desktop. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but then I ran into the constant forced spectator mode problem. I figured I would bypass that by using pbsetup, and WHAM! Bluescreen all over again. This is really frustrating, and I would appreciate all the help that I can get.

Are you sure it's punkbuster causing your BSOD?

Well, it's fine when I haven't updated punkbuster after a reinstall, and right before it happens, I can see the light blue Punkbuster text at the top of the screen, so I'm pretty sure it's PB. Also, this only happens in multiplayer PB servers. If it helps, the BSOD says

"Fatal exception 0E at 0028:C003C8A6 in VXD IOS(01) +00001446"

which is weird because most of the errors relating to IOS(01) that pop up when I google it are related to scsi printers, which to my knowledge have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with quake.

What version of Windows are you using (Me or older, I suspect) and are you patched up to the latest service pack? You'll want to make sure all your drivers are up to date because it looks like PB is triggering a bug in one. That, or it's exposing hardware failure.

Yep, I'm running on good old 98SE. I have too many legacy programs, games mostly, to upgrade, but I'm trying to convince myself to make the jump to 2000. I have all of the latest updates, insofar as one can have the latest updates ever since Microsoft stopped supporting 98/ME. As for hardware failure, the possibility of it has crossed my mind, but all of the other crashes and hangs and bugs I've experienced have been remedied by a repair install of win98. Also keep in mind that Quake was running fine until about last weekend, when I started experiencing crashes on some servers. Oh well, just chalk it up to one more reason I need to ditch 98.

I have very few games that won't work with XP one way or another. DOSbox supports loads of the old DOS games. Others have XP fixes and such. Upgrading would be in your best interest regardless of whether it's causing this problem or not.

Yeah, I know... Mainly I'm worried that XP will run like shit on my PC (p3 800MHz) I mean, hell, it's slow on my family's p4. That and the whole thing about not having $180 to spend on it and WGA bugging you if you use a pirated copy. 2000, though is an entirely different story. I just got another hard drive (20 gb WD200, nothing special,) so I can finally do a fresh install of 2k and keep my old hard drive with all of my files on it as a secondary and to fall back on if I need to.

However, If I do ever get a decent motherboard/processor, then by all means, I'll go to XP, but not Vista. NEVER VISTA. Along with the hard drive, I did manage to acquire a Socket A motherboard for my Athlon Thunderbird 1000, but I tried to upgrade the shitty Compaq BIOS and bricked it. Maybe someday...

Oh, and if that little monologue was tl;dr, I apologize. It's late, and I tend to ramble when I'm tired.

zc_guy wrote:NEVER VISTA

lol :D