I started playing F1 yesterday (for the first time) and it was running just fine on my XP SP3 machine. However, today it hanged unexpectedly. This happened in the Khan raider camp - I went into a tent and one of the raiders initiated combat. He screamed something and the game hanged immediately - I got a black screen, looping music and no response to any input. Had to kill it.

I'm playing the latest version of the game (part of the Fallout Trilogy released by Interplay). I have no community patches installed - it's a completely "official" version.

Do any of you experience anything like that while playing? How common is it? How stable is vanilla Fallout overall? I absolutely hate games that crash often so that was an unpleasant suprise.

I usually avoid community made content but if there's some patch that fixes this problem without altering the gameplay, I'd check it out.

Before you tell me "check your system", don't even bother. It's in perfect condition since I use it for gaming only. It's a clean Windows install with the latest drivers, Fallout 1 and nothing more.

Not common, no. I've never had Fallout crash (at least that I can remember) since it came out. You may want to adjust compatibility mode to '98 or SP2 and make sure you're running it as administrator just for [censored] and giggles. Usually "looping music" is a sign of a sound-card error or glitch which often force a black-screen and the need for a hard reboot. I know I've had massive bad luck with Realtek in the past (I literally was unable to finish Mass Effect because of this).

And I hate to even ask/suggest it--but as you may know "illegal" copies of games are often very prone to such crashing and general lack of stability.

Fallout is a decade+ old game so you should expect that it might have some trouble running on your perfect-but-too-new system
People usually don't experience serious problems with it but you should expect a crash every now and then!

Get the unofficial patches though... they don't alter the gameplay - check the stickie.

OK, good to hear that. I'll just hope the crash I experienced was a rare exception.


Somehow I doubt it's a sound card problem. I've got a Creative X-Fi card and so far I've been very happy with it and never really had any problems in other games. Actually, when the game hanged, I thought I was experiencing the well known "black screen" Fallout problem (some users reported random "blackouts" while playing which are easily cleared by pressing 'C' or 'P'), so I simply pressed 'C'. That didn't help, of course, but I heard some short sound in response to that (I probably wouldn't have heard it if the sound card driver had crashed). Also, I didn't have to do a hard reboot - killing the Fallout process was enough.


Actually such cases are extremely rare if you use content from well known sources (there are exceptions, of course, but they're just that - rare exceptions). I risk being modded down for this, but I'll tell it anyway - the paradox is that in many cases cracked content is simply more convenient to use for the end user compared to legal content and games are a good example of that. I'm not advocating piracy at all, but in my opinion, all the draconian copy protections some companies use only make life more difficult for their customers, not pirates/crackers.

Anyway, this does not apply to my case.

Somehow I doubt it's a sound card problem. I've got a Creative X-Fi card and so far I've been very happy with it and never really had any problems in other games.

I don't quite understand why having a decent soundcard means there wouldn't be a problem. The other games that have worked just fine have all been modern, I would guess?If not then whatever, but it's worth considering.

Actually such cases are extremely rare if you use content from well known sources (there are exceptions, of course, but they're just that - rare exceptions). I risk being modded down for this, but I'll tell it anyway - the paradox is that in many cases cracked content is simply more convenient to use for the end user compared to legal content and games are a good example of that. I'm not advocating piracy at all, but in my opinion, all the draconian copy protections some companies use only make life more difficult for their customers, not pirates/crackers.

Anyway, this does not apply to my case.

Due to this I've actually downloaded cracked copies of games I own just to avoid the hassle involved, haha.

No, not at all. Actually I haven't played a modern game in ages...

I suppose it depends how one defines "modern" in the context of games.

I just finished my first run through of Fallout, and it worked fine for me. It's the version that came with the trilogy pack and I didn't patch it. Dell Inspiron530 with a Radeon 2400 card running Vista . It hung up on me two times near the end....the screen went to black and Vista told me the program stopped working. Don't remember exactly what I was doing though when it did. Nothing too important though. Canceled out of it and then just restarted the game and continued on.