Re: General protection fault crashes

Yes I did disable the windows XP compatibility setting and cleared my INI settings, I forgot to mention that in my previous post.

I will try my onboard soundcard tomorrow and see if that helps.

I have contacted EA support again but they have now forwarded my case to a specialist who may help.

They first told me to create a "bug report" here but this game won't be patched any time soon, besides many people play this game without crashing on Windows 8.1 so there should be a fix out there somewhere 🙂

@Selvator

Yea, I also played it on 8.1 and now on Windows 10 without problems. That's why I think it's a Hardware or driver problem.

Small update:

I have done some more searching on the web.

and found out the windows Even Viewer gives some more details into this problem , this is the log result:

Faulting application name: MassEffect.exe, version: 1.2.20608.0, time stamp: 0x4a55fea1
Faulting module name: wrap_oal.dll_unloaded, version: 2.1.8.1, time stamp: 0x46927487
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0002f9e0
Faulting process id: 0x1d40
Faulting application start time: 0x01d1c898e03b09f6
Faulting application path: C:\games\Mass Effect\Binaries\MassEffect.exe
Faulting module path: wrap_oal.dll
Report Id: 196e32a0-34ac-11e6-8429-94de807d3b59
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

I read somewhere else that I could apply the following fix:

"1) in /program files/Mass Effect/Binaries locate the OpenAL32.dll and wrap_oal.dll files

2) Rename OpenAL32.dll to OpenAL32.bak

3) Rename wrap_oal.dll to OpenAL32.dll

4) Launch as Admin by using the MassEffect.exe"

Before I do that I will now test using only my onboard soundcard.

I am now using standard Realtek drivers and I am no longer using my Xonar U7 and will see what happens.

If it still crashes I will use the above fix and see if that changes anything.

On another side note, the Specialist at EA is a dead end, he won't help me, this is the respond I got:

"thanks for the update.

Sadly since this game was released so long ago, there is not any developers around that we can work with in order to get this up and running. That team simply does not exist anymore so it is difficult for us to support the game outside of the normal troubleshooting steps we have already tried.

Now with that being said, I do want to do everything I can to help you out. I can get you a newer title that we have and add it to your account for Free today. This is a list of all the games that I can offer you for Pc. Go ahead and take a look at them and shoot me back an email and I will be happy to get one of these games added for us.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Sims 4
Mass Effect 3
Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare

I look forward to your reply and working with you to get this resolved"

I think it's nice that they are being honest about this though, the game is just to old to help me with this problem it seems, hopefully some day this game will get a "remastered" version so they can support it again.

The fact that they allow me to get a game for free is really nice though, I would easily trade in ANY offer just to prevent the game from crashing but hey it's a nice gesture.

I will update here once more when I have done testing the above stuff.

Sorry for the late reply.

Due to some personal stuff that's been happening lately I haven't had much time to play or to test.

However I have some VERY good news.

It seems that the crashing has stopped, after the last troubleshooting tests I have played about 13 more hours without a single crash.

At the end these 3 steps are probably what solved it:

1. Use my Onboard sound instead of my dedicated soundcard.

2. Disable Raptr

3. Disable my MSI Afterburner overclocking.

I completely forget about the last 2 steps.

I don't like Raptr at all, it causes issues for more games lately like crashing on startup for example, I only use it to "farm" points, disabled everything else in that program but I know it's bloatware and you may hate me for it :P

I also forgot about MSI afterburner, it never gave me problems but when I disabled it, it got rid of more crashing, I don't use the overlay of any of these programs but Mass Effect didn't like these.

Thanks for all the help you have given me to resolve this issue, in all honesty you were a lot more helpful then the "specialists" from EA, you should get paid by them instead :P

Hi @Selvator

Good to hear that it works, and Thanks for the XP.

I think that the renaming of the DLL also played a roll, but be that as it may the important thing is that it works now.