The Dink Network

Newcomer. Love the game. One problem: About 1 out of every 30 times I cross onto a new screen, the computer restarts. First I hear the music stutter about 5 times, then *RESTART*, which makes the game unplayable for me. Has anyone else had this unfortunate experience. Any help??

Not heard of this one... maybe the venerable redink1 has. It's certainly not typical.

Does it shows the blue screen of death?
I remember I had this problem while playing FIAT. The problem was a certain MIDI.

Though a peasant cannot approach unto an holy one, any comment from the august Redink1 would be an enlightenment for sure. No blue screen of death, just death: it bypasses shutdown and goes directly to system restart as if I had grounded-out the system. I'm running v1.06 (on Windows 2000 pro) which I uninstalled, then reinstalled, then installed the v1.08 patch. I tried deactivating all security and startup programs and running with no sound or other checkmarks in the Dink start-up box. No luck yet. Think I should download the main v1.06 file again?

You should download the 1.08 patch.

Is this the main game or a d-mod?

Main game with v1.08 patch. Gee, you guys have such cool names.

New to the Intertubes, eh?

I haven't heard of the problem. With the music stuttering, it might be worth trying the unofficial v1.08 Aural+ patch to see if that could help.

Hmm, it could be any number of things, depending on your computer.

1) Do you have a virus?
2) Does it shut down for only this game?
3) Do you have integrated sound or integrated video? Or, what type of computer do you have?
4) Right click on "my computer" then "manage" then "event viewer" and browse through there looking for windows error messages, especially the ones marked in red. Anything?
5) Are you playing with a keyboard or joystick?
6) Do you have all system updates? Service Pack 4?

You could also have a motherboard or PSU that's going on your computer. It's not a problem related to Dink.

Merlin: Been away for awhile. (They don't really still use tubes, do they?)

Venerated Redink1 one: Will try it. Thanks.

Merlin:
1. Squeaky clean.
2. Only this game.
3. Dell Dimension L500cx computer (plain jane) with integrated graphics and Creative Audio PCI (WDM) sound card.
4. I'll check this right after one of my Dink crashes.
5. Keyboard.
6. Service Pack 4 and rollup.

Since it only happens on this game it's (of course) probably not a hardware problem. Some other games do have graphics problems though, in which some graphics are sporadically invisible.

Well, thanks for all the head crunching.

I think I might know what your problem is. First of, lots of computers that I've come accross, well, the video driver in them is crippled. It's not really noticable, but if you stop certian critical services in windows (you don't want to, usually) (you need task-schedular, whoda'thunk?) you can't start them back up, because, hey! The driver for your display? It's not really there. The computer only thinks it is when it's running. I have no idea why. So best advice I can give you is to find the latest drivers for your computer, download them, uninstall the old ones and then put the news ones on. Now, when you have the old ones out, you'll probably experience a slowdown, but that's to be expected.

Good luck!

Chrispy: Be with you in a minute.

TO ALL: BRUTIFUL, SIMPLY BRUTIFUL. The Master's patch, "v1.08 Aural+ patch" fixed the problem. The crash always occured when the music would have changed. Now I hear a slight hiccup but the game continues without a problem.

Chrispy: Your suggestions may fix my other problems. Thanks to you and to everyone.

For completeness sake:

I did manage to crash one more time after about a half hour's play. Then followed Chrispy's advice and updated my video driver. No more crashes after several hours play and some programs (including Dink Smallword) look better.