Bionic Commando 3D
July 6, 2010I downloaded this title from Steam a few nights ago and have been struggling with frustrating system lock-up problems ever since. I went through the usual suspects: the game and its patches, video card drivers, sound drivers, GPU temperature, CPU temperature (usually causes a reboot when the core temperature goes too high, but I investigated just to be sure). My machine was having the following symptoms:
1. The game would freeze in seemingly random locations – a reboot was required to fix it
2.  Eventually my desktop froze as well at one point, which seemed to indicate it wasn’t the game
3. I tried three different video card driver versions: AMD Catalyst 10.6, 10.5, 104
4. I tried a brand new video card, using a different chip set (nVidia), then subsequently returned it to the store
5. I tried posting to the Bionic Command message board with a DirectX dump (useless, apparently the game is too old)
6. I made sure my fans were running at peak efficiency
7. I cried (only a little)
Until it occurred to me, that it could be Steam causing the crash. So, I took Steam off-line, as it is not possible to play Bionic Commando without it (when purchased through the Steam network). Low and behold, it was a miracle. No freezes. For your reference, here are a few of my vital stats in case someone from Steam wanders by:
Windows 7 64-bit Professional
Intel Core2 Quad CPU with 4 GB of RAM
ATI Radeon 3850 with 500 MB of VRAM
Steam API v009; built June 30, 2010 14:43:46
Here’s the system information Steam gathered.
Categories: PC
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2 Responses to “Bionic Commando 3D”
So, it appears this was the work of an evil gnome lying deep in the bowels of Windows 7 64-bit edition. I do not know what the problem was to this day, but it seems installing Windows 7 32-bit made the problem go away. No for a little more pew-pew, and a little less QQ.
Ahem. Many more symptoms and crashes later (I just stopped using my PC for a while until I could afford to fix it). It wasn’t any of those things and had nothing to do with Windows or the Bionic Commando game. It turned out to be my motherboard (with respect to the 800 Mhz RAM I was using) which was causing the system to freeze. Apparently, the Asus P5N-D board has a number of issues related to memory and over-clocking (which I wasn’t doing); none of which are fixed by the BIOS update.
Care to comment?