CompuServe Messages

Hi, Nik— As per your instructions, I booted up as plain as I could get, cleaned up both my drives with CHKDSK /F, backed up my 3ds.set, configured the Render display to 640x480x16 colors, chose CRUISER.GIF as my background image, and tried to render to disk without any additional geometry. As soon as the Rendering in progress… status bar appears, the system freezes (there is a single-pixel-wide red line at the beginning of the status bar). This behavior is no different from the other times I tried to render a scene with a background image (regardless of color mode or geometry in the scene). When I used the 102 drivers, the system would either freeze or reset itself, but after I loaded the 105 drivers, I've only had the system freeze. Incidentally, I've discovered another problem, which may or may not be related to the background difficulty–it showed up when I started to work on the more complicated tutorials. It seems that when I run out of available memory, instead of the swap file kicking in, I get thrown out of 3ds with the following error: Abnormal program termination: Page fault CS: EIP: 000Fh:0023F5AEh This is a repeatable error; if I watch my memory usage carefully and, when it gets close to my total available memory, make my scene more complex and attempt to render it, I can get 3ds to end with the above message. There is no observable hard drive activity prior to getting this message. I have not altered any of the cfg386.exe settings; they are still at their defaults. In case you don't have all of my system's info, here it is: Computer: 486DX2-66MHz VLB, 20 MB RAM Video Board name: Stealth 24 VLB (Diamond; uses the S3 chipset, has 1 MB RAM) Video BIOS version: 1.1 (I have a later version of the BIOS, but there's no difference in 3ds's behavior if I run it instead) CONFIG.SYS: FILES=40 BUFFERS=20 AUTOEXEC.BAT: PATH=C:\;C:\DOS;D:\;D:\3DS3 C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.COM PROMPT $p$g C:\STL\UTIL\STLBIOS.EXE (STLBIOS is the TSR for the video card; without it, 3ds will not run) To my knowledge, I had no problem installing 3ds. I sat and watched the entire installation process like a hawk, and don't recall anything strange occurring. Hope this info is useful in narrowing down the problem—I'm having a wonderful time learning and using 3ds, but it's a little tricky working around the unavailability of background images. Thanks for helping out! 🙂 Elizabeth