Could be a cooling issue?

Games could put the system under additional stress, generating more heat. Take a look to be certain your fans are working and that there is good air flow.

JoeCorrado wrote:

Could be a cooling issue?

Games could put the system under additional stress, generating more heat. Take a look to be certain your fans are working and that there is good air flow.

CPU Fan seems to be working fine

Sorry but when I show the link using the img command, only half of the picture gets shown

Perhaps your PSU or your motherboard are giving up the ghost. I once threw out a really nice 486 system I had because it started crashing whenever I played DooM. 🙁 I kept the hard drives and sound card and put them in another 486 box, but it just wasn't the same.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Perhaps your PSU or your motherboard are giving up the ghost. I once threw out a really nice 486 system I had because it started crashing whenever I played DooM. 🙁 I kept the hard drives and sound card and put them in another 486 box, but it just wasn't the same.

If thats the case then I'll probably might go out to buy either a new 486 motherboard or a new PSU and see which fixes the problem (PSU is an old style AT one)

I would blame the AWE64 and Apogee's sound code. I've had freezings with Apogee games with the AWE64 on a Pentium II before. Something involving the DSP seems to trigger a hard lock

*Moved to marvin

If this system can boot CDs, try using the "ultimate boot CD" (.iso available online) and test mprime and/or memtest86 or other such stability testing utilities. This can help narrow down the problem to a smaller set of possible causes, and it's probably quicker and more repeatable than testing in a game.
If it can't boot CDs, or you just don't want something that big, then memtest86 can also be downloaded by itself in floppy format.

Note though that a memtest error doesn't mean bad RAM, it just means there was an error using the RAM. This can happen from an unstable motherboard (including misconfiguration), CPU, RAM, or power supply. It does eliminate expansion cards and software glitches though, and it makes a more repeatable way to test any attempted fix.

shamino wrote:

If this system can boot CDs, try using the "ultimate boot CD" (.iso available online) and test mprime and/or memtest86 or other such stability testing utilities. This can help narrow down the problem to a smaller set of possible causes, and it's probably quicker and more repeatable than testing in a game.
If it can't boot CDs, or you just don't want something that big, then memtest86 can also be downloaded by itself in floppy format.

Note though that a memtest error doesn't mean bad RAM, it just means there was an error using the RAM. This can happen from an unstable motherboard (including misconfiguration), CPU, RAM, or power supply. It does eliminate expansion cards and software glitches though, and it makes a more repeatable way to test any attempted fix.

My machine can't boot off of CD's
But I had used Memtest86 before back in May to test the RAM and it was OK. I had problems with my sound card once before and after playing some games more without using Sound or the Gameport, I can only imagine that the problems might be related to the AWE64 card on my PC.

From your first post it sounds a lot like an IRQ conflict. You sure there's no IRQ or DMA conflict?

Post the contents of your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, someone here should be able to sort them out. 😉

In the meantime, see if your games run correctly when you boot "clean". Hold shift when you're booting up to do this.