From technical FAQ
" Originally Posted by AC888
My Asus M5A97 R2.0 mobo allows me to overclock it with the click of a button through the BIOS. What had happened was I clicked the High Performance button so that it would slightly tweat with the voltages to overclock my CPU by about 300MHz and RAM by about 150MHz. My CPU can be overclocked to a further extend this is just a well known safe setting that Asus has for the clock boost. I never thought it would affect my ability to connect but the issue happened around the same time I did this and it immediately ended after the BIOs settings were returned to default.
If someone could shed light on this then please do tell, but I don't recommended overclocking your CPU even using manufacturer's settings."
_______________________
I have an ASUS M5A97 PRO motherboard. When trying to play on SOEs servers, I had to spend a lot of time hacking around "AI" overclocking of the board to get past the character loading screen - turning off TURBO mode on my (brand new) AMD 8350 was the clincher, but the motherboard does some odd things to memory and north bridge frequency if you let it.
Well, on to Project1999 - what a breath of fresh air it is! - and all was running OK until I upgraded the RAM (to some nice, spiky Kingston Hyper X 2x8Gb 2133MHz units) which would not play well with the motherboard until the frequency was dropped to 1728MHz - with heavy tweaking of the subsidiary parameters by the motherboard's "MEM OK!" (sic) app. With this setup it booted properly and all was well...except EQ P99.
The symptoms seemed to lead to the eqhost.ini and I discovered I could not even successfully ping to login.eqemulator.net. Much resetting of routers (Netgear DGND3700v2 connected through a BT openreach DSL fibre router to Zen Internet (in the UK)) later I looked into the "error 1017: Cannot find patch server" and I saw the quoted message above and recognised the motherboard.
Now, I could generate the 1017 error only on my second pass at logging in - The sequence was as follows:
After typing in password and clicking Quick Connect I would see a flash of a full screen window being drawn and then got dumped instantly back at the login screen to type in the password again. Doing so and then clicking Quick Connect again would repeat the process. However, if I clicked Login I would see the server select screen with the variuos EqEmu servers. Selecting Project 1999 (1) and clicking Play Everquest, I would then see the Error 1017 dialog box.
If I exited and restarted the program and after supplying the password I clicked Login I would again see the server selection but this time, upon selecting a server and clicking Play Everquest I would be be dropped back onto the login screen to retype the password again - replaying the scenario a second time, though and I would see the Error 1017.
My interpretation is that the motherboards memory tuning was fritzing the loading of the game as soon as I tried to Quick Connect or Play Everquest and crashing the program back to login but the EQ client was interpreting the failure as a failure to connect to the server (possibly because the interval before timing out the connection was somehow timed on NB frequency/CPU bus frequency?) So, it was only on subsequent attempts to start the game the program "knew" it couldn't connect and posted error 1017.
The game now runs but my beautiful RAM is running at 1333MHz, like a crippled sloth in a coma. The things I put up with for a proper game of EQ!
|