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FeelingShred: To be honest, I have only come across these long game "crashes" a looong time ago, when I still played the game in a pentium PC with Win XP on it. I can count on one hand the times I lost games due to crashes (and even then I always used alternating saves, so I could easily restore from there and change the "future" of what would happen in the next turns)
Since I've been playing the GOG release (I got it around 2010??) I didn't have a single problem. Since then, I also changed playstyle. Back in the day, I used to be super careful and play on defensive mode, spamming the map full of towers. Since I switched to playing the game more aggressively and pretty much not building any turrets anymore, I didn't have a single crash.
I still applied the dos32a patch to see if dosbox' speed would improve, never seen any problem after that either.
The only problem I still had was the "countdown to zero" problem, when the computer's turn would never end. The solution I found to that was constantly moving the map while the A.I. turn's lasts, it's more effective if you scroll the map with the mouse than with the keyboard. It seems like if you keep your CPU "occupied" scrolling the mouse makes the AI behave properly. The reason for that I don't know, I just know that doing this works.
And please, always use alternating saves, missions in this game are long, don't rely on a single save. Change slots every 5 turns or so, so you can easily go back in time if anything happens.

Oh wait, I remember another thing: regarding the "AI neverending turn" thingy, I manually edited the MAX.INI file in order to increase turn times. I set the player's turn to the maximum possible value (16 minutes if I recall correctly) and the "End Turn" timer to 999 or something like that. Never had a problem since. But I still scroll the map during the AI's turn in order to make it pass faster. If I leave the computer untouched while the AI moves, it seems to last much longer, for some reason.
It's really really sad to see such an incredible game being treated this way, the guys allegedly lost the source code?? After programming the "best skirmish AI in a game ever" ?? Yeah, what a fantastic move for your programming career right there, holy baby jesus... And really sad to see that the sequel MAX2 was also riddled with bugs. What's wrong with those guys? Were their offices cursed or what? Amazing... When you see things like OpenXcom or even Diablo being recently reverse-engineered, you start to wonder if the same would happen to MAX if only the developers took a little more care of it.
It seems that you play with simultaneous moves, not turns: is that true? according to other posts, that should be the reason you haven't incurred in so many crashes
So i know this is an old post now but for all you M.A.X fans out there i came across this project on Github the aim of which is to to fix the game breaking defects present in the original game executable and to create a runtime that natively runs on modern operating systems.

https://klei1984.github.io/max/

While its still in early development so there are no binaries available just yet it's looking promising might finally be able to play a game without it malfunctioning constantly because even after unbinding the old defective dos extender and using something like the dos32a extender instead the game is still full of bugs and things that just don't work right due to issue like memory corruption.

Although the death nail for me in every game I've ever played has been when the timer gets stuck at 00:00 and the game refuses to change turn, of all the bugs M.A.X has that has to be the nastiest and most game braking bug i have ever seen and unfortunately i never found a way to circumvent that one which was particularly irritating on one really long game against 3 god mode computers where i was at around 1000 turns after switching to the dos32a extender.
Post edited December 17, 2021 by Cursed-Ghost
Most issues are caused by running out of XMS memory. The game manager changes operating states based on various events from task, production and AI state managers. If the DPMI server runs out of XMS memory objects allocated on the heap will simply not be created which the game handles gracefully in most situations (without crashing) which means that certain state managers could stuck in a temporary state which would be progressed further by an event that was failed to be allocated in RAM.

Whenever the turn timer stops at 00:00 and you either cannot open the Preferences window or in case you can open it but after clicking the File menu button while the Preferences window is still open crashes the game you can be 100% sure that the game ran out of RAM.

As the AI does not save its pending tasks with the game state there is always a slight chance that after running out of RAM and hanging or crashing the last saved state could be reloaded and the game could progress further as the task manager is empty which would otherwise use a lot of RAM.

The GOG.com version of M.AX. 1 now uses DOS/32A extender, great, but they left the system RAM at 32 MB instead of the maximum possible 64 MB. That 32 MB amount is simply not enough if there are thousands of units and hundreds of tasks not to mention that various GUI controls leak memory so the more certain GUI elements are used by the player the less heap memory is left available for units and tasks. It is also a problem that the game allocates small blocks of memory in the order of kilobytes and this leads to more and more memory fragmentation.

So the first thing to try is to raise the RAM to 64 MB.

Change memsize=32 to memsize=64 in dosboxMAX1.conf

To make it sure that DOSbox actually sees the configured memory issue the mem /c command before executing the maxrun.exe executable and observe the printed report before game start.

Change
"
cls
Maxrun.exe -fD:\MAX
"
to
"
cls
mem /c
cls
Maxrun.exe -fD:\MAX
"
in dosboxMAX1_single.conf

Of course this does not fix the many game logic bugs, and 64 MB is not enough either, but it keeps the game in operating state a bit longer if the DOS extender can use it.

Another way to conserve RAM is to disable the enhanced graphics and disable music or even any kind of sound while the computer players take their turns.
Post edited July 05, 2022 by klei.604