[Solved] Immediate CTD, Tried Everything

[displacementzero 2]

I've been playing SC4 Deluxe (download from Amazon) on my laptop (HP G62, old but I only use it for SC4) for years now with no issues other than the occasional CTD from quick zooming. I typically hook up a monitor and play on there, except recently my kid came in and unplugged the monitor while the game was going on, forcing a weird shift of the game window back to my laptop screen, with the graphics flashing on and off until I did CTRL-ALT-DELETE to escape and end the program. Tried reopening SC4 the next day and I'm not getting anywhere before an immediate CTD right after the "SimCity 4" intro screen. Tried plugging monitor back in, same deal. Uninstalled and re-installed the game, same deal. Moved the city I was working on to another folder thinking maybe just the city was corrupted, same deal. Cleared my plugins folder, you guessed it. Did the "-d:software" prompt and that didn't work either. DirectX Diagnostic Tool came back clean. What I'm assuming is that I fried the graphics card when it went from the monitor to the laptop screen, but I'm having no problems with any other programs. I don't know what else it could be, but would appreciate any help or workarounds that I haven't tried yet!

Some technical specs:
PC: HP G62 laptop

Disk Drive: Hitachi HTS545032B9A300

OS: Windows 10

Graphics Card: Mobile Intel 4 Series Express

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Check your graphics card's config (there should be a utility to adjust settings). It might have updated itself while the monitor was disconnected, and you might need to kick it back into shape to support SC4, directX 9 etc.

Try reducing the custom resolution of your SC4 start so it will fit on your laptop screen (in case it's trying to squeeze itself in there).

Survey the files in your SC4 folder under program files. See if anything like an ini file got updated during your incident. Read the config file and latest error log.

If you still can't fix this, then share the SC4 config file and log file here and ask a local tech friend to do some hands-on trouble-shooting.

Good luck!

 

[displacementzero 2]

I'll be darned, option 2 (reducing the custom resolution) did the trick. I was able to get into the game, open my region, open a city, save, etc. with no problems. I'm fine with playing on the laptop screen for now as long as it's working. I'll be back here if further issues pop up.

Thank you so much for your help!

[rsc204 21,804]

On 04/10/2020 at 2:57 AM, displacementzero said:

What I'm assuming is that I fried the graphics card when it went from the monitor to the laptop screen

Honestly, today's electronics just don't break like that, they are stuffed full of safety cut outs that make it almost impossible for user error to end with broken hardware.

What actually happened is SC4 simply can't handle changing resolutions or displays dynamically like this, although many modern apps can. So when a hardware change was detected by the operating system, it was applied to the running apps, causing SC4 to crash, since it likely has no code to handle the event. I assure you nothing is broken, except perhaps some settings getting messed up in the process.

On 04/10/2020 at 8:33 PM, displacementzero said:

I'm fine with playing on the laptop screen for now as long as it's working

If you switch between the laptop screen and an external display which use different resolutions, you will need to alter your configuration when you switch between them. But if I'm hearing you right, normally you only play using the external screen? You should try to undo any config changes you made trying to fix the issue, that turned out to be unnecessary. Trying to troubleshoot problems, it's often necessary to try out things, but you should always revert any settings that didn't help, because they might actually cause problems. In-short, as soon as you restore the settings for SC4 that allowed your external display to work, you should have no problems returning to that setup. If you haven't done so for whatever reason, you should reboot your PC once before moving on.

If you have trouble getting the external display going again, just come back here and we can troubleshoot through it.