I can try to gather details on my changes later, but might be in a good position to help diagnose.
This issue used to happen fairly regularly after I started playing again in ~2016. Around 2018 and beyond, I combed through threads and did practically everything except WinEQ2:
- Altered .bat for CPU affinity 1
- Altered .bat to /wait to keep cmd window alive
- Set eqgame.exe compatibility to WinXP SP2
- Installed dgvoodoo2
- Forced use of nvidia card
- Altered nvidia settings, tinkered with a lot here
- Probably some others I can't remember
Hard to nail down what specifically helped, but this problem went away for years.
After another p99 break, I started up again about a month ago. More out of curiosity than anything, I was tinkering with some settings and ended up with a slightly new setup. This freezing problem has now happened twice in the past month. It seems fairly rare, but it's not something I've seen in a very long time.
High level recent changes:
- No longer using .bat to launch
- No CPU Affinity 1
- No /wait for cmd shell persistence
- Altered some nvidia settings, returned a lot to defaults (notably removing vsync)
- Altered registry to enable Large Address Awareness for eqgame.exe
- Updated version of dgvoodoo2
- Altered dgvoodoo2 config (used GUI this time, previously would edit config file directly)
- Possibly other changes, can review in more detail later
I likely (hopefully!) have a backup of my previous setup (minus the nvidia settings) so can compare this evening. My hunch was undoing CPU Affinity 1 being the leading culprit, but that likely conflicts with many players who do not have this issue and also have not set CPU affinity.
Have you (or anyone) been able to determine what triggers this issue? Locations, parameters, etc. that could be used for some relatively controlled testing?