A new day. Another hour debugging Windows XP.

After a nights rest, I went to work on this problem again. The good news is that I fixed it. The bad news is that I don’t actually know what the cause of the problem was.

I uninstalled every device I could think of trying to find one that stopped the interrupts. Nothing worked until I killed the CCC process. CCC is the Catalyst Control Center by ATI; it is the little icon tray app for ATI video cards that starts their display control panel.

Unfortunately I know that I killed that same process the first night and nothing happened so it seems that it was the combination of removing hardware and killing the CCC did the trick. Oh, and don’t forget the 50-million reboots that Windows requires anytime you change something.

All in all, not a satisfying fix since it did not really identify the cause of the problem. DRM? Video driver? Hardware interaction?

So my PC is fixed but I still have a problem. I still want to play Homeworld 2.

Homeworld was released by Sierra, a fine company that self-destructed. Wikipedia says the license was sold to THQ in 2007 but they haven’t done anything with it. There is no version on Steam but there is a Mac version. Unfortunately the Mac version is PPC-only so no luck there either.

Do I reinstall the game and hope the bug doesn’t happen again? On the hunch that this was a DRM issue, I looked for a cracked version of the game.

I hear a lot of complaining about software piracy but I haven’t stolen a game since middle school and my Apple IIe. I was kind of surprised how easy it was. Google for “crack homeworld 2” and the first hit was an updated .exe that doesn’t check for the CD. I got the file and popped it into my install directory and it worked.

Now I am playing the game at 60fps. There is no visible slow downs like before and no problem with interrupts. Maybe it was the DRM after all...