Football Manager Crash Dumps

Question

I've a Football Manager 2010 game that continually crashes after a particular league match. When it crashes it generates a crash dump file. Does anyone know how to read this file so I might determine what's wrong and potentially fix the issue?

Answer 1

I too have had FM2010 crashes and you can find the WER files usually here:

C:\Users\*User*\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive

I just right-click and Open With Notepad.

I found that FM2010 was pretty stable up until I performed a bcdedit /IncreaseUserVa 3076 change on the operating system to allow more memory to games. I've found since I rolled that back to default (2048?), the problems have gone away.

Answer 2

Assuming the crash dump produced is a standard mini dump file format, you can open it with Visual Studio (any recent version, newer ones are usually more user-friendly) or another debugger such as WinDbg.

Note that getting useful and accurate information from a dump file in this fashion requires a fairly decent degree of experience with low-level debugging. If you are not a programmer with that kind of background, you will probably be very disappointed by the contents of that file.

You'd be better off looking at the event log viewer tool or for the WER files (as referenced by another answer).

Answer 3

If you're running the game via Steam you can try verifying the integrity of your saved game. Open steam at the library view. Right click on Football Manager and select properties. This should open a window with a local files tab on the far right. Select this and choose both the options to verify the integrity of game cache and to defragment game cache option.

I'm not sure if Football Manager itself provides this functionality (if you don't use Steam) but there may be a utility. Otherwise you could register the game in Steam. Either way hopefully this should resolve the issue.