Celestia 1.2.5 crashes on startup

[Duane534]

I have a Windows 98 SE system with an Intel Direct AGP graphics card. I don't know what that means, but it came with the computer about two years ago. I have used older versions of Celestia before, but somewhere along the line, it became incompatible with my computer apparently. When I start it, the title bar comes up, the top menu comes up, and I get the error:

CELESTIA caused an invalid page fault in
module <unknown> at 0000:00000000.
Registers:
EAX=000084c0 CS=017f EIP=00000000 EFLGS=00010202
EBX=0076f384 SS=0187 ESP=0076f1e8 EBP=00000400
ECX=01625500 DS=0187 ESI=01625538 FS=400f
EDX=01631e50 ES=0187 EDI=00000000 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
01 00 00 00 65 04 70 00 80 4f af dc 00 80 00 00
Stack dump:
004769da 000084c0 78aa030c 0076f480 00000000 0076f624 00000800 00000001 00000000 01625500 80000000 3f800000 43a9a34e 425efdee 44bed877 48962e6f

If you can help, post here or email @ Webmaster@freedownloads.f2g.net

[selden]

Celestia v1.2.5 has a bug which causes it to crash if your OpenGL library is v1.1.

Solutions:
1) install the very most recent drivers for your graphics chip. If you're lucky they'll include OpenGL v1.2 or later.
2) wait for Celestia v1.2.6, which will include a fix for the bug.

[ryan]

how do you install the latest graphics

[selden]

Go to the web site of the manufacturer of your system.
Find their "dirver downloads" page. It often has its own link or is associated with their "service" page. Most manufacturers have a "search" page, too. Find the page associated with your particular model of system.. Follow the instructions on that Web page.

Sometimes Intel's "model" drivers can be used, sometimes not. It depends on what kind of "glue logic" was used by the system manufacturer.

[Edwin]

Refering to the crash problem, I have a similar one: Celestia starts up, moves perfectly to Io, then when I come near, it crashes.

Check that the error is quite similar:

CELESTIA caused an invalid page fault in
module <Unknown> at 0000:00000000.
Registers:
EAX=000084c0 CS=017f EIP=00000000 EFLGS=00010202
EBX=0076f384 SS=0187 ESP=0076f1e8 EBP=00000400
ECX=01625500 DS=0187 ESI=01625538 FS=56c7
EDX=01630c10 ES=0187 EDI=00000000 GS=426e
Bytes at CS:EIP:
0b 00 c9 00 65 04 70 00 16 00 de 07 65 04 70 00
Stack dump:
004769da 000084c0 78b0030c 0076f480 00000000 0076f624 00000800 00000001 00000000 01625500 80000000 3f800000 4672a02f 451ef683 c7880548 c8916a3e

I use Traditional Chinese Windows 98 SE, Intel(R) 810e Chipset Graphics Driver (DC133). I don't know what OpenGL version I have.

Can anyone please tell me how to fix this problem? Or how can I check for my OpenGL version?

Thanks
Edwin

[selden]

You probably have OpenGL 1.1.

Try installing Celestia v1.2.4. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21302

The Help menu includes an item to display the OpenGL details.

[Don. Edwards]

And while everyone else skirts the real issue here I will be the heavy. The built in Intel graphics procesor is not very good at OpenGL at all. I would be quite suprised if you get it working at all much less getting it to render at any exceptable speed. If I were you I think I would be looking for a decent PCI graphics card. At least consider it. The memory alotted to video is not much more than 8mb in the best of cases that I have come across. Thats going to severly limit your texture usage.
Good Luck though.

[Dave007]

I too am getting the crash. I have an ATI RAGE XL XPERT98 card and it's not supported by GLupdate. Also the latest drivers (made back in 2000) I can find are installed. The original windows crash message is as follows:

CELESTIA caused an invalid page fault in
module <unknown> at 0000:00000000.
Registers:
EAX=000084c0 CS=017f EIP=00000000 EFLGS=00010202
EBX=0076f384 SS=0187 ESP=0076f1e8 EBP=00000400
ECX=0161b050 DS=0187 ESI=0161b088 FS=6527
EDX=01630530 ES=0187 EDI=00000000 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 80 00 00
Stack dump:
004769da 000084c0 7abf030c 0076f480 00000000 0076f624 00000800 00000001 00000000 0161b050 80000000 3f800000 449195ba 42bbb5fe 45138a66 c8a8a510

We've all seen this, but maybe you havn't seen what is really crashing. I used W32Dasm to debug the program, and I tracked it down to a call to initialize opengl. See below:

The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.

At EIP 00000000

This Exception is NOT Being Handled

Terminate Process?

* Reference To: OPENGL32.glEnable, 0rd:0050h
Address of crash: 004769DF FF159C024C00 CALL DWORD PTR [004C029C]

rem (note that 004c029c is out of range)
rem (apperantly when opengl is called, it is being called at the wrong address)

I'm sure the author is already aware of this bug, and this post is just to confirm that it is a problem with opengl to all us regular folks.

btw, thanks to selden for posting the address of the older version, it works fine.

[Dave007]

sorry i forgot to say my OS is win98 (original). It has all the critical updates and is running directx8. CPU is Pentium MMX @~250Mhz.

[selden]

Dave,

You neglected to say which version of Celestia is crashing for you..

V1.3.0pre3 is now available. It fixes both the v1.2.5 crash with the v1.1 librries and a crash in v1.3.0pre2 that I was seeing with a Rage 128 Pro card. pre3 is available on the Web page http://63.224.48.65/celestia/files/ That page includes older versions of Celestia along with some add-ons that Chirs has made avaiable.

In case you haven't been following some of the other discussions, v1.3 has had major functionality additions. They aren't finished yet, though, and still need testing, which is why this is still a "prerelease".

[Dave007]

I have version 1.2.5. I became aware of Celestia by a search for "astronomy software" on yahoo, and yahoo dropped me off in the 1.2.5 download this morning. I didn't even notice the version, until you asked and I reviewed my transfer log. I had assumed it would be the latest version.

1 hour to go on the v1.3 download now, hopefully it will run smoothly.

Thanks

[selden]

Good luck!

[Dave007]

V1.3 is up and running now, no problems with crashes so far. The framerate is low (.5 - 1.2 fps), but that's probably b/c of my slow processor and 8 megs of video ram. Framerate seems to stay the same with all rendering options on or off.

Thanks again

[selden]

Dave,

It's good to hear that the crashes are fixed.

That low a frame rate suggests that your card's 3d hardware isn't actually being used. You might go into Celestia's Help menu to see what version of OpenGL it's using. If it's v1.1, that would suggest that it is actually using Microsoft's software OpenGL library. ATI's libraries have several more digits in the version number.

Also, you might try using just the lores planet textures. They'll load a lot faster although they'll be blurrier, of course. The easiest way to disble the medium resolution textures is just to rename the directory they're in. Changing \textures\medres\ to \textures\medresno\ would do it. The hires directory is empty in the distribution kit. If there are particular planets you want to look at in detail, you can create an empty medres directory and put just those textures into it.

You should also try disabling various options in the "Render" menu, in the "View Optioons" item. "Night Side Lights" are rendered very slowly (in software) by the older ATI cards. Try turning down the limiting magnitude of the stars, too. The more stars and galaxies that have to be drawn, the slower things get.

(added later: I just realized that I might have misunderstood which "Render Options" you were talking about. I assumed it was the Control-V set, but now I suspect you don't even realize they're available. If you haven't already, you might try typing a Control-V. That will cycle through the various "rendering path" routines available for your card that Celestia uses. My guess is that both "Basic" and "Multitexture" are being used for your card. "Basic" should be much faster, although some of the "eye candy" won't be available. )

I hope this helps a little.

[Dave007]

Celestia reveals that it is using opengl v1.1:

Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
Renderer: GDI Generic
Version: 1.1.0
Max simultaneous textures: 1
Max texture size: 1024

Supported Extensions:
GL_WIN_swap_hint
GL_EXT_bgra
GL_EXT_paletted_texture

In "View Options" I turned off everything except planets and stars, and set star visibility to 50. This gave around 2.3fps for planet close-ups, and around 6fps for stars (windowed 800x600 24bpp and fullscreen 640x480 24bpp). Pressing cntl-v helped a little, with 2.6 fps for close planets and 7.8fps for close stars.

Also, I have spotted a bug in pre3:
While trying to find some kind of updated opengl version, I stumbled onto a webpage that suggested for ATI rage chipsets, only the 16bit color depth allows 3d opengl acceleration... so I switched to 16bit color depth, then anytime I tried to go fullscreen with Celestia, it crashed. When it crashed, it left my screen at 640x480 16bpp, with the taskbar somewhere offscreen. Switching back to 800x600 restored my taskbar. The windows crash message was:

CELESTIA caused an invalid page fault in
module ATIO9XAE.DLL at 017f:6901d9ca.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=017f EIP=6901d9ca EFLGS=00210246
EBX=00000000 SS=0187 ESP=0077f554 EBP=0077f580
ECX=cb3ad940 DS=0187 ESI=00558a78 FS=5887
EDX=00000000 ES=0187 EDI=0055914c GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
8b 4a 3c 0b c8 8b 44 24 10 89 8e c0 6b 00 00 b9
Stack dump:
00000000 00558a78 69019f4b 00558a78 00000000 00000000 01650590 00558a78 00c20374 00000000 00000001 0077f598 6901a003 00581df8 00000001 0055912c

I must note however, that while I was in 16bpp mode (800x600), Celestia in windowed mode had a much higher fps than I have seen so far, I couldn't bring up the fps display, but I would roughly estimate that I was getting 15 fps close to planets, and 20 or higher just looking at stars.

Also worth reporting is that in 16bpp 800x600 windowed mode, there was no text in the window.

(added later)
Also I renamed medres to medresno

[Edwin]

Refer to my previous post, I finally got something more to know from FreshDiagnose: OpenGL 4.0 Build 1381.4 DirectX 9.0 Build 0900

I don't know if this helps but I have to wait for a newer version. I don't know programming very much.

Edwin

Refering to the crash problem, I have a similar one: Celestia starts up, moves perfectly to Io, then when I come near, it crashes.

Check that the error is quite similar:

CELESTIA caused an invalid page fault in
module <Unknown> at 0000:00000000.
Registers:
EAX=000084c0 CS=017f EIP=00000000 EFLGS=00010202
EBX=0076f384 SS=0187 ESP=0076f1e8 EBP=00000400
ECX=01625500 DS=0187 ESI=01625538 FS=56c7
EDX=01630c10 ES=0187 EDI=00000000 GS=426e
Bytes at CS:EIP:
0b 00 c9 00 65 04 70 00 16 00 de 07 65 04 70 00
Stack dump:
004769da 000084c0 78b0030c 0076f480 00000000 0076f624 00000800 00000001 00000000 01625500 80000000 3f800000 4672a02f 451ef683 c7880548 c8916a3e

I use Traditional Chinese Windows 98 SE, Intel(R) 810e Chipset Graphics Driver (DC133). I don't know what OpenGL version I have.

Can anyone please tell me how to fix this problem? Or how can I check for my OpenGL version?

Thanks
Edwin