Windows 11 Angband 4.2.5 stability issues

[Blicht100692]

I'm running Angband 4.2.5 on windows 11. For some reason it seems completely unstable. about 1/3 of the time at start up it throws up a dialog box showing a parse error in one of files (i have not edited them) restarting the parse error disappears. about 1/5 of the time it starts up and waits for about 20 seconds and then just shuts down. When i gets past these points it just shuts down at random times. In the event log its a generic Access Violation (0xc0000005) that's happening. I tried running in compatibility mode and nothing seems to help. Anyone experience similar issues and any ideas on how to overcome these issues. I've run various versions of Angband for years, and this is the first time I've run into these issues.
Thank you.

[backwardsEric]

From your description, a hardware problem - probably something related to the memory - seems likely. There's apparently a memory diagnostic test built into Windows 11: some links describing how to use it are https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surf...ory-diagnostic and https://www.techrepublic.com/article...agnostic-tool/ . There's also the standalone tool, MemTest86 ( https://www.memtest86.com ) which you boot off of a USB flash drive.

[Blicht100692]

Yes, I had considered that and ran both the windows tool and the memtest86 tool. Both gave a full pass

[backwardsEric]

Two more possibilities that come to mind:

1) Are you running Windows 11 on an Arm processor? Angband's executable for Windows from GitHub is built for x86 so it would run in an emulator. I do not know why that would cause stability issues.
2) In case the executable was damaged during the download or installation, you could make a copy of your current Angband save files (lib/user/save and lib/user/archive within Angband's directory), remove Angband, reinstall, and put your save files back into the reinstalled Angband directories. The executable from https://github.com/angband/angband/r...-4.2.5-win.zip appears to be fine (at least when run in Wine on Linux it successfully loaded an existing save without problems).

[Sky]

I'm running Angband 4.2.5 on windows 11. For some reason it seems completely unstable. about 1/3 of the time at start up it throws up a dialog box showing a parse error in one of files (i have not edited them) restarting the parse error disappears. about 1/5 of the time it starts up and waits for about 20 seconds and then just shuts down. When i gets past these points it just shuts down at random times. In the event log its a generic Access Violation (0xc0000005) that's happening. I tried running in compatibility mode and nothing seems to help. Anyone experience similar issues and any ideas on how to overcome these issues. I've run various versions of Angband for years, and this is the first time I've run into these issues.
Thank you.

*waves*
hello u/FalseReveal886 .. happy to see you've found your way here.

[Blicht100692]

Two more possibilities that come to mind:

1) Are you running Windows 11 on an Arm processor? Angband's executable for Windows from GitHub is built for x86 so it would run in an emulator. I do not know why that would cause stability issues.
2) In case the executable was damaged during the download or installation, you could make a copy of your current Angband save files (lib/user/save and lib/user/archive within Angband's directory), remove Angband, reinstall, and put your save files back into the reinstalled Angband directories. The executable from https://github.com/angband/angband/r...-4.2.5-win.zip appears to be fine (at least when run in Wine on Linux it successfully loaded an existing save without problems).

Thank you for the suggestion. I am running on an intel 13th gen i9. I have fully reinstalled a few times and re-downloaded, but the problem persists. Interestingly if I run in a sandbox it seems like its fine. One other thought occurred to me that might be causing it, I am in the Window's insider program, specifically on the Beta Channel, possibly this is causing the issue, but its difficult to know. I have un-enrolled from it, but it won't take effect until the next major windows release. Hopefully this is the explanation.

[Blicht100692]

*waves*
hello u/FalseReveal886 .. happy to see you've found your way here.

I appreciate the links you sent me. thanks.

[backwardsEric]

Thank you for the suggestion. I am running on an intel 13th gen i9. I have fully reinstalled a few times and re-downloaded, but the problem persists. Interestingly if I run in a sandbox it seems like its fine.

Chasing the "it bails on parse errors in different files" angle, is there something different about where you've stored Angband on this system? If Angband is getting bad data when reading the data files, that would cause parse errors and might explain the other symptoms (hang at startup and then exit; apparently random crashes while playing). When running in the sandbox, the files could be on a different drive or simply cached in memory. Copying Angband to the sandbox should be problematic if there was trouble with the drive storing Angband, but perhaps the difference between Angband's reading the data files a byte at a time via fgetc() and the pattern of reads done by the copy means that one runs into trouble and the other does not.

[Blicht100692]

Chasing the "it bails on parse errors in different files" angle, is there something different about where you've stored Angband on this system? If Angband is getting bad data when reading the data files, that would cause parse errors and might explain the other symptoms (hang at startup and then exit; apparently random crashes while playing). When running in the sandbox, the files could be on a different drive or simply cached in memory. Copying Angband to the sandbox should be problematic if there was trouble with the drive storing Angband, but perhaps the difference between Angband's reading the data files a byte at a time via fgetc() and the pattern of reads done by the copy means that one runs into trouble and the other does not.

I've been trying the sandbox and I thought that might have it fixed, but it still crashes. Most of the time in the libpng12.dll module. The parsing issue happens completely randomly. Run it, hit a parsing error. Run it again, no error. Different file, different location. I have not hit the parsing issue in the sandbox, but I have, as I mentioned a moment ago, crashed when just moving around. I've also crashed when loading the opening splash screen (prior to the selection for New and Open). I wonder if its having trouble with the RTX-4090? FYI: I also went to windows defender and forced it to ignore scanning or monitoring anything in the angband.exe process.

[Blicht100692]

Just to give some examples, in addition to starting fine, and also silent fails (the screen just disappears and no error is given) here are examples of errors I got when starting the application:





To be clear, these errors did not happen in a row. I would start the application and get the first dialog, closing the dialog shut down the app. Then I'd launch the application and it would be fine, so I'd close it. Then I'd launch the application and I'd get the second dialog example, after clicking okay, the application would shut down. I would launch the application and it would start fine. I would shut down the application and then launch it and get the 3rd dialog. Sometimes the same dialogs come up again. Its very random, like a threading operation where the they aren't syncing right.

[Gwarl]

If you don't mind using the ascii interface you could circumvent this entirely by simply playing online.

[Pete Mack]

It should be impossible that those errors be intermittent, as reading parse files is entirely deterministic. And it is (probably) too early in the game for memory allocation errors to show up.
I do have one question: why are you using libpng12.dll in a windows install? But this should be irrelevant to the parse errors. Did you build this yourself, and how?
I to recommend playing online at angband.live in the meantime. Without actual debugging in the beta environment, I can't imagine this being fixed.

[Blicht100692]

I do have one question: why are you using libpng12.dll in a windows install? But this should be irrelevant to the parse errors. Did you build this yourself, and how?
I to recommend playing online at angband.live in the meantime. Without actual debugging in the beta environment, I can't imagine this being fixed.

I did not do a custom build (although I did download the source just to see if I could identify where the issue was happening). The zip file for the windows version of angband comes with libpng12.dll and zlib1.dll.

[backwardsEric]

Are you still using the default graphics (it depends on the screen size either using the Gervais tiles or Shockbolt tiles) or have you set it so it is using a different set of tiles or ASCII? Is the game stable enough that you can load a save file and use the Options->Graphics menu to switch the graphics to None if its not already using ASCII? When using ASCII, there should be no calls into libpng and you could see if that did anything to affect the stability of the game.

[Blicht100692]

I've tried a bunch of things. I'm going to assume based on the response that it is somehow connected to my machine specifically. I'm note sure why, its a clean machine and fairly standard, but I will continue to investigate the issues. Thanks to everyone who made suggestions, I appreciate the help. If I stumble on the solution I will certainly share it.