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grandwazir · 15-09-2008, 07:55 AM

SPORE is a great game, but unfortunately caused a few problems for me which took me some time to debug. I've seen lots of posts on various subjects in the forum as well as some gems hidden away and I think it would help the community if we had a thread with nothing but solutions in, which hopefully, when the official sticky on the forum gets updated these can be added too.

"Save game failed - spore will now exit"

This is usually because you have ran out of space. You need to make sure you have enough space on your system drive (where windows is installed) for whatever you set your graphics cache to (if you haven't changed this, it is 1GB) plus another gigabyte. So for most people you will need about 2GB spare on C:

Why do you need the extra gigabyte? Because Windows uses this space for when it runs out of physical memory. Having some space free will not only make SPORE work better but the rest of your computer too. Having no space free on your system drive is a recipe for disaster and will cause loads of problems.

SPORE crashes to desktop when launching

First of all if you are playing as a restricted user or if you are playing in Vista, try running SPORE as an administrator. This is a horrible workaround but it is the only way I can get it to work on my machine. Without it SPORE will always crash to the desktop.

If that doesn't work try deleting your cache files. You can find them at "Documents and Settings\<user-name>\Application Data\SPORE". Delete everything that has .package on the end of it.

If that doesn't work you might have a corrupt save game. This is especially true if this only started happening after you received a "Save game failed - spore will now exit" error. You will have to delete the offending save game before it will start. You can find them in "Documents and Settings\<user-name>\Application Data\SPORE\Games".

It is worth renaming Game0 to something else and Game0.old to Game0 to see if the backup will work. If it doesn't delete them both.

If all else fails delete everything in "Documents and Settings\<user-name>\Application Data\SPORE" which will force SPORE to regenerate the entire folder to how it was when the game was first installed. This should clear out any corrupt settings and hopefully save you a reinstall.

Spore crashes - complains "DasmX86Dll.dll not found"

I had this problem and it was entirely related to the fact I was not running the game as an Administrator. As soon as I did that it never graced my exception log again

I've installed SPORE and it has disappeared! How can I start the game?

This usually happens if you are using Vista. The game places it's short cut in the games explorer which you can get to by opening the start menu and clicking on games.

15-09-2008, 07:55 AM	#1 (permalink)
grandwazir Rookie Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 70	Common fixes to SPORE problems SPORE is a great game, but unfortunately caused a few problems for me which took me some time to debug. I've seen lots of posts on various subjects in the forum as well as some gems hidden away and I think it would help the community if we had a thread with nothing but solutions in, which hopefully, when the official sticky on the forum gets updated these can be added too. "Save game failed - spore will now exit" This is usually because you have ran out of space. You need to make sure you have enough space on your system drive (where windows is installed) for whatever you set your graphics cache to (if you haven't changed this, it is 1GB) plus another gigabyte. So for most people you will need about 2GB spare on C: Why do you need the extra gigabyte? Because Windows uses this space for when it runs out of physical memory. Having some space free will not only make SPORE work better but the rest of your computer too. Having no space free on your system drive is a recipe for disaster and will cause loads of problems. SPORE crashes to desktop when launching First of all if you are playing as a restricted user or if you are playing in Vista, try running SPORE as an administrator. This is a horrible workaround but it is the only way I can get it to work on my machine. Without it SPORE will always crash to the desktop. If that doesn't work try deleting your cache files. You can find them at "Documents and Settings\<user-name>\Application Data\SPORE". Delete everything that has .package on the end of it. If that doesn't work you might have a corrupt save game. This is especially true if this only started happening after you received a "Save game failed - spore will now exit" error. You will have to delete the offending save game before it will start. You can find them in "Documents and Settings\<user-name>\Application Data\SPORE\Games". It is worth renaming Game0 to something else and Game0.old to Game0 to see if the backup will work. If it doesn't delete them both. If all else fails delete everything in "Documents and Settings\<user-name>\Application Data\SPORE" which will force SPORE to regenerate the entire folder to how it was when the game was first installed. This should clear out any corrupt settings and hopefully save you a reinstall. Spore crashes - complains "DasmX86Dll.dll not found" I had this problem and it was entirely related to the fact I was not running the game as an Administrator. As soon as I did that it never graced my exception log again I've installed SPORE and it has disappeared! How can I start the game? This usually happens if you are using Vista. The game places it's short cut in the games explorer which you can get to by opening the start menu and clicking on games. Last edited by grandwazir; 21-09-2008 at 01:38 PM..