Re: Command and Conquer GENERALS AND ZERO HOUR WINDOWS8
I'm frustrated by this problem too. I have Command and Conquer Generals Deluxe Edition, and although both the original game and Zero Hour install ok (and the front-end programs also successfully download an update patch), they crash with errors on startup. My guess is that the problem is caused by the Macromedia "SecureDrive" copy-protection system used by EA for this game (and others). Copy protection systems very often break Windows protocol rules to ensure that game media cannot be copied, and unfortunately it virtually guarantess that games will have compatibility problems at some point. This, of course, leaves consumers like us as the victims, as we end up with expensive but useless software.
In case anyone at EA is interested, here is the dump file from C&C Generals: Zero Hour, running generals.exe on Windows 8.1 with NO compatibility mode set, but running it as administrator. (I tried all the compatibility modes, together with a number of solutions suggested on the web, but none has worked.) And yes, it looks like the dump file was truncated as it doesn't show the current stack at the bottom of the report.
Release Crash at Sun May 18 01:09:22 2014
; Reason Uncaught Exception during initialization.
Last error:
Exception is access violation
WinMain at 401700
Error code: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
Description: The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.
Access address:000778FB was read from.
Stack Dump:
<Unknown>(-1) : <Unknown> 0x779501BF
<Unknown>(-1) : <Unknown> 0x7794FF39
<Unknown>(-1) : <Unknown> 0x77789A15
<Unknown>(-1) : <Unknown> 0x007D66BB
<Unknown>(-1) : <Unknown> 0x007851D2
<Unknown>(-1) : <Unknown> 0x00785027
<Unknown>(-1) : <Unknown> 0x0074EBFB
Details:
Register dump...
Eip:779501BF Esp:0018AE30 Ebp:0018AF30
Eax:025BDE90 Ebx:025A0040 Ecx:000778FB
Edx:0005721B Esi:025BDE88 Edi:00BE0000
EFlags:00010246
CS:0023 SS:002b DS:002b ES:002b FS:0053 GS:002b
EIP bytes dump...
Bytes at CS:EIP (779501BF) : 8B 09 8B 52 04 3B CA 0F 85 23 80 05 00 3B C8 0F 85 1B 80 05 00 0F B7 06 29 47 74 8B 8F B4 00 00
Current stack: