Help please! My game keeps getting a Runtime Error and then crashes.

Daverey06

Daverey06

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Aug 13, 2020
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Hello everbody, it's so awesome to have found this forum and to know there are still others out there even today that loves the Black & White game series as much as I do. I know you all must love it or why would you bother going through all the trouble just to get it to play again! lol Anyways, thanks for letting me join, I have learned a lot just from looking at different posts on this page and it has truly been invaluable to me.

That said, I recently installed the first game with the disc I have from way back when I bought it years ago. After installing patches 1.1, 1.2 and 1.42 I have had the game running beautifully, although I may have to install the patch to get the music to work, but honestly I didn't even notice it was missing while playing.

My major issue though is I usually can play the game for a while but whenever it either autosaves or I try to manually save it in the temple, I often get an error that I don't know how to fix. I play the game on administrator mode and the error doesn't happen every time I save it, only occasionally. I think I may have gotten the error even when the game wasn't saving, but to be honest I can't remember for sure.

The error reads "Runtime Error! Program: ...es (x86)\Lionhead Studios Ltd\Black & White\runblack.exe abnormal program termination."

Has anyone else received this error? I am sorry if I missed other posts about how to fix this, but I would appreciate any help you all can provide. Other than that issue, I have been very happy with the excellent fan patches that have been made to get this game running better than I ever remember it running back in the day.

Thanks very much for any help you can provide!
 
I would re-install in a folder that does not include special characters, such as ......(x86)\.....\Black & White

A quick way to do this is to delete the C:\Program Files (x86)\InstallShield Installation Information\{E51B4CD9-A0A6-4324-B26A-31B3F2DE26CE} to the recycle bin and make a backup of your registry. (you could restore both if the new install goes south)

This will allow you to install a new Black & White folder somewhere else.

I created C:\Legacy\Black-N-White\ and made sure to disable inheritance of the Legacy folder from the C: drive and created unique permissions, (do not delete permissions). (Indexing can slow the game down. Once I turned off the folder attribute "-I", the game seemed to run much more smoothly for some odd reason, especially during cut-scenes.)

Once you're all patched up, you can copy the Profiles folder of your old B&W instance to your new one.

If anything should go wrong, you still have all the old files in your old folder as backup.
 
Thanks very much! I will do my best to follow your advice. I appreciate it.

Just out of curiosity, is there any similar issues to this one in Black & White 2 or BOTG?

Thanks again!
 
I couldn't tell from your post, but do you have personal experience with the error I mentioned? Is this a foolproof way to fix it?

It sounded as though you thought it might work but that it was not a certainty. Is this the only solution recommend for this particular error?
 
Personal experience with the error.

I've also fixed it another way that is a little more complicated, and retains the default location for install.
 
https://www.bwfiles.com/forum/index.php?topic=8305.0
Just thinking outside the box and trying to remember what differentiated Windows XP from Windows 10. Older Windows programs were heavily reliant upon paths and environmental variables that have changed over the years as Windows has become more reliant upon registry settings for the environment instead of the .ini files of older versions.

I did quite a lot of other things trying to force the install.  I happened across it by having moved the folder from the B&W InstallShield (x86) folder to the regular Program Files folder and re-attempting the v1.10 patch.  At which point I saw a different message from the patch.  It then occurred to me the patch could find the default location, but there was something else at play.  Upon restoring the InstallShield folder back to the original location, the same old messages returned.

Completely on a hunch, and believing it was to be as fruitless as other attempts, I initiated the patch after having altered the location, then hoping some of the patch code would remain resident when the folder was renewed to default.  I was surprised when it actually worked.

My original thought was to initiate a second patch instance once the first patch (having been left open) had passed the initial message, but that turned out to be unnecessary.  I inadvertently closed the patch after the changes, thought I had to start over, and found the next patch instance processed the patch without error.
 
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