In the 4 or 5 years I've been playing this game (4 Trad teams, 6-10 LL's), I think I've had maybe 12 total crashes, but at least 8 or 9 have been in the last year or so. In the past, the old programming code didn't seem to have this memory leak problem causing the crashes (or at least, not as much).

The crashes that I encounter every few months or so (once this week) always occur at the same time (at least for me):

- game is in a late inning (usually 8th or 9th)
- the game has had lots of hits and/or runs
- ...which leads to a game with lots of lineup or pitching changes.

These observations lead me to believe that the game's memory leak probably is occuring whenever you goto your lineup page to make a change (each time you goto the lineups, it keeps some of the memory).

Over the years, I've played the game on Win98, Win98SE, WinMe, Win2000, and WinXP Pro. It makes no difference what OS that I'm using, and no difference what computer I'm using (either of my two high-end desktops, or my Dell P3 laptop). All of my computers have fast processors (P3 1ghz-2ghz) and 256 or 512MB of RAM. All of them have minimal to zero startup programs and nothing is in the system tray when I'm running the game (I even shut down the IE browser window after the game starts). The only "programs" that are running during the game are "explorer" and "systray", both of which are required to operate in Windows.

Every single time I play a home game, I reboot the computer to reclaim any lost memory, but when a home game has lots of roster moves, it is susceptable to a crash. I typically play my games fairly fast (5-10 min per game, play by play at 100%) and it has no affect on the crashing frequency whether or not I play the game rapidly or not (it's all about the lineup changes). I've had pitching duels, with minimal roster movement, that I've played nice and slow (even taking a phone call for 15min, walking the dog, eating lunch, etc...) but it won't crash.

It would be interesting to try playing a home game while the task manager is running in the background (to monitor memory and CPU usage), and take note at what point crashes occur.

Of course, this would be alot easier and practical to do if we had the PB demo working, but we don't (and I don't feel like potentially crashing any games that actually count).

Hopefully we'll get a programmer involved with Purebaseball that can fix the game's bugs and get this problem under control.

-----------------

As for the cheating issue, yes it happened alot in the past (when you could close the program and pick up where you left off). That has been fixed with the current version of the game (now, 2? years old).

The only real cheating that I've seen now is the 5th game cheat (which has been described in a previous thread.....not submitting a game 5 loss and taking your chances with the robot). This is very easy to catch and monitor though. Legit. game crashes happen at random (game 1, 3, whenever)...not always game 5. If you see a consistent pattern of game 5's not being finished within a reasonable amount of time (30min max, I would think even the slowest of players could finish), then you likely have a cheater on your hands.

Jon Diehl
St. Louis Trash
Champ, 99T2, 99T3, 00T2