LCD Smartie Causes Instability in Half life 2

[Blaze89]

Recently, I had installed Half Life 2 and boy did I have some trouble getting it working. So I worked on it for hours and eventually got it going. (For the record, I used the DNA drivers for ATI cards. Worked a treat!)

I finished the game in 4 hours because I only had it on easy. A few days later I started a new game under hard and no matter what I did, the game would run for a minute or two and crash out due to instability. WELL... I tried reinstalling the Game, then the DNA drivers, then ATI's drivers, reinstalled the game again, and then back to the DNA drivers again. I must have spent hours on it and then finally it clicked. The one thing that was different a few days ago was processes. Sure enough as soon as I ran the game without LCD Smartie in the background, everything was peachy.

I'm still not sure why LCD Smartie is causing this instability, or if it has caused problems with other instalations of Half Life 2 or other programs for that matter, but it would be something to look at if you have trouble with a program not working.

For the record, the symptoms were that Half Life 2 would crash out randomly (Either just before or just after the menu appears) and produce an error or just crash and have to be reset.

Anyhoo, I hope this helps someone, Blaze.

[mattcro]

Curious. I guess you haven't had any crashes in HL2 when Smartie is not running? Do other games work fine? How is your LCD connected? Parallel port, serial, USB...

I run LCD Smartie 5.4 (previously had 5.3, and now beta 5.4.1) on a Matrix Orbital serial-port LCD and have had no problems with Half-Life Source, Half Life 2 and Episode 1, nor any other games as far as I know. I'm using an NVidia Geforce card, so drivers may have had something to do with it.

[Blaze89]

Nope HL2 has been flawless other than the issue with the ATI drivers. And other than that all other games work with LCD Smartie. Although I have been having stability problems with GTA: SA but so far the crashes are too infrequent to diagnose.

As for the screen, it is a non-standard HD44780 from Jaycar (It's either QP5517 or QP5518 I forget.) connected to the onboard LPT. It is quite different from a standard 44780 (i.e. It draws power from the LTP AND an adapter and without one it won't start, however if the external power is removed as long as it is still connected to a powered LTP port it will still refresh/retain the last frame.) but it still connects the same just with a different pinout.

I tried two sets of drivers, but ATI's never worked. I guess one thing i'll have to try is to send a print through the port and see if that crashes the game, but with the only printers in the house being USB... But I think you might be right, drivers seem to be the only logical reason at the moment.