SimCity4 Crashes at the start

[latehorn 0]

Story: At first it I could start it and chose a zone to build a city on. But then when I chosed one, it swichted back to the desktop once the loading was complete. It wasn't really a crash because the application was still running in the taskmaneger, but I couldn't go back to it. So I decide to update to the latest version. Did that and then restarted the computer. So now it crashed in the beginning right before the EA Games picture. This crashlog was created then.

Hardware: Gforce 5500 and AMD 3000XP

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

From your dump, it seems you went down at initialization time.  512MB is the minimum to run this game with XP, but you must also have other good things.

You need DirectX 9.0c if you don't have it.

Please run DXDIAG (from the Run box) and see if there are any system errors.

We also need more information about your system.  Sometimes some other driver, commonly your sound driver, is the culprit.

The crash shows that you had an ACCESS VIOLATION which is something like a branch out of the program into the proected areas.  This can happen if you swap file isn't big enough.  In your case the virtual memory should be set to manual control with (initial, maxumum) = (1536,2048)

Is you machine a dual core?  I am not familiar enough with the AMD models to know.  If so, you definitely need to set the program affinity to run in one CPU.  Because of the kind of multi-tasking the game does, it can get both processors and go nuts.

Since we don't have the source for neither the game nor the O/S these minidumps are not a lot of help.

[latehorn 0]

Well My OS is Windows XP(5.1 Build 2600)

512MB RAM

have DirectX 9.0c already

GForceFX 5500 with 128 RAM

No sound device at all..

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, just a second ... The box I have says a DirectX 7.0 (or later) sound device is required.  I suspect that you crashed in the initialization because you have no sound system.