Anyone else experiencing freezing while playing? It happened to me on several occassions, once in the main menu, once when I was just idle in a course and another time right after I finished a hole. And it freezes in a way where it's impossible to get out of the game by Alt-Tab or anything else. The sound still plays, though, it's just the gameplay that's frozen. Any ideas?

Same here, I can't enter properly into the game, the intro and the menu loading is extremly slow and I have to reset or close windows account to get out.

The culprit is the bundled wrapper to make the game compatible wth new computers but in this case it does not work for me.

I used a different wrapper that used to work fine to me in other games called ddrawcompat, it is just a draw.dll, overwrite the original oneand it is done.

With this wrapper the game runs and I can enter into the game but he game randomly freezes completely and I need to restart. So no a solution for me. But it could work for you. Just make a try.

What I am doing now is delete or rename the draw.dll file and let the game run vanlla. At first it will not be able to launch. So I run it with "Windows XP compatiility setting for all users" and the game runs. For now it is stable but I can not assure it will be in that wayfor long. I have good feelngs though. The only gripe with it i that you can suffer some kind of mouse pointer flickering, but nothing unbearable.

Greetings

I have noticed one thing. I you have enabled "flag animations" and the other environment animations the game always freezes needeing to restart, it doesn't matter if you are using the wrapper or not. With them deselected the problem aleviates but not always.

And as a note, the wrapper has a configurator called dxcfg.exe, you can find it into the game foler or via Galaxy. Try to tweak different things there to see if it works for you

Not sure this will help anyone but........

So I have now tested Links 98 On two systems.

My ryzen 9 it freezes and hard crashes my PC.
So no go on this one.

My older fx8350 it runs fine no crashes.

Here are the specs from both systems.

Ryzen 9 3950x 16core
64 GB ram
270 Super

FX8350 8 core
16gb Ram
980 gtx

Not much of a fix or help but so far All i have found that works for me.

Sorry for late response - I'll be testing out your ideas in the coming days and I'll see what helps the most. Worst case scenario, I'll boot it up through my XP Virtual Machine.

Links LS 1998 runs fine on my Ryzen 5 laptop with Windows 10 21H1 using the included wrapper, as long as I disable Background animations and Animated flags in Course Settings. I didn't have to apply any compatibility settings to the game executable.

It works fine on my Ryzen 7 3700x win10 also.

Only pc that is giving my issues is the ryzen 9.

Wonder if it is an issues that The witcher 2 has on my ryzen 9 where I have to trun off on of the cores? Might have to test that.

Turning off reflections worked for me. Hope it keeps working.

thanks for the info guys. by opening dxcfg.exe in the game folder, i disabled vertical synchronization and the game no longer freezes. i am running the game in 1280x1024, with all of the course settings maxed.

edit: ok it's freezing again haha.

I have tried these various methods and still seeing intermittent lock ups and crashes. Has anyone tried Links 386 instead? Does it behave any better or does it have the same issues?

i have tried 386 and it works fine. uses dosbox.

edit: i have now tried Links 98 on my other PC and there was no freezing at all.

my computer specs that freezing occurs:

(laptop) 3210m CPU, nvidia 650m GPU, windows 7. (tried both integrated and gpu)

my computer specs that no freezing occurs:

(desktop) 4790 CPU, nvidia 1060 GPU, windows 10.

my laptop is about 10 years old so it could be that the freezes are due to no longer supported hardware/drivers or windows version. but i don't want to speak for everyone. i did no modifying of settings to get it to work on the desktop. after installing i just started up the game and played with no issues.

Well I just managed to complete my first 18 holes at Kapalua Bay without a single crash or freeze. I'm running an older Windows 8.1 i7 laptop with GTX 850 graphics chip and what I had to do was three-fold.

#1: Make sure Links LS 98 was using the Nvidia chip and not my Intel chip for the graphics (simply right-clicking the .exe and selecting my preferred chip worked).

#2: Open Links LS 98 and while running make sure the CPU affinity was set to a single core through Task Manager.

#3: And of all things, turn on animated flags. Without this option enabled, the screen would freeze as soon as the ball reached its apex and only redraw after it had come to rest. Playable, but not as much fun.

After I did these three things I was able to score a 92 at Kapalua Bay on the hardest settings with only occasional animation freezes while putting. Still better than my real game.

I'll be doing more play and testing to see if it remains stable, but right now I am psyched to play this classic once again.

None of these proposed solutions for Links LS 98 ended up working for me, the game will still randomly freeze/crash mid-match on a Win 7 x64 machine. Sometimes I can play for about 15-20 minutes tops before a crash, other times it'll crash sooner. No problems with Links 386 Pro though.

Is the GOG team going to look into these Links LS 98 issues?

Hello joker341!

I am playing on a notebook with Intel UHD 620 integrated graphics with Windows 10 64-Bit and have/had similar problems, especially, after I had experimented with some different combinations of external wrapper settings and ingame graphics/detail options.
What I could observe is, that the game is only progressing to the next stroke or next hole after all animations and then all corresponding sounds did play to conclusion!
While we can reduce the amount of additional animations being displayed, I did not perceived a real difference when leaving the sound options ticked or unticked. And I guess, herein lies one of the instabilities of the program:
In each case when the game was seemingly randomly freezing during my turn or right after finishing/putting a hole one or more soundfiles kept repeating, preventing the gamestate from progressing.
(In two occasions it took the game a while... two or three minutes... to finally finish the repeated reproduction of the audio files including commentary and continued normally by itself.)

Regarding the lockups on the majority of the freezes, I could regain control of my Windows desktop by keeping ALT+TAB pressed and moving the mouse cursor down over the windows taskbar and on here right-clicking to open the task manager, where I force closed the frozen game task.
(Since, I also have a docking application in use, I can hover over my docking bar and launch any utility/app - for instance, Paint - just to open another window to regain full control of my desktop.)
Thus, no need for a last-resort user logoff or change. Hello Gudadantza!

I had the same issue with the extremely slow loading main menu, seeing only little progress by ALT+TAB-bing back and forth to the game's application, after I accidently switched the ingame display settings to fullscreen & same as desktop (from within the games graphics options, not from GOG's wrapper!).
Only a clean uninstallation and reinstallation of the program could resolve the startup Problem.

My best results in playing the game with fewer interruptions/crashes is by using GOG's original presets of both external wrapper settings and ingame options, running the game in fullscreen, aspect-ratio-correct 800 x 600 resolution and 32-bit colour depth!
I can run the game in 1024 x 768 (32bit colour depth), but both fullscreen and windowed mode run significantly slower and are more prone to crash more frequently.

Furthermore, some ingame options seem to increase the risk or propability of freezes and crashes on my end, besides having an measurable impact on performance:

- any resolution above 1024 x 768
(e.g. 1920 x 1080 caused the main menu issue above)

- display (object) shadows independent of distance of cut off
(GOG did left them turned off initially! I could run with them but experienced more random crashes and slow downs.)

- additional flag and background animations
(GOG did left 'reflections' on but the other two animations off! And these seem to have a different impact on different courses or holes on which I am playing. Maybe, because sometimes there are more than one flag visible and even reachable on close enough nearby holes.)

- clouds
(GOG did left clouds off! This was my biggest surprise! Because at first I kept 'more' or at least 'less' clouds always active, until I realised that many freezes or instant crashes occured when the ball was passing clouds our a cloud layer!
By the way, I am using 'medium' ball size in order to easier follow the flight pass even without tracers.)

Two final observations sofar from me:

1.)
Repeatable instant crashes to desktop (the game's application closes itself immediately and windows askes me to apply compatibility settings - which I always deny!) do occur when my former shot leaves the ball in an approximate 40 to 67 yards range towards the hole and the program automatically chooses the SW with a straight or chip shot, especially, but not necessarily, when on or near the fringe both with grid automatic grid display on the green or without.
Even changing the swing mode or from the SW to PW, Iron or Putter does not help.
=> In those cases, the swing meter/bar does not do the regular bit of overswing but instead always runs to the full circle before returning into the downwards swing, and the game crashes to desktop before the golfer animation is loaded!

My only countermeasure for this "near hole / yard - SW issue" is to avoid shots that are landing within its range. Either getting close enough for the Putter being selected automatically or keeping a safe distance to the hole of about 75 yards. Otherwise, a taking a "Mulligan" is a necessity to avoid the crash!

2.)
Keeping each already played ball from mulligans (GOG did left this option turned on ingame!) and using the tracers is very nice, but the game does continuously keep track of each one of them even though they are not displayed anymore after a screen refresh (e.g. position or rotation change, or ALT+TAB switching back and forth for screenshot taking) and propably cause sooner or later a memory leak and thus freeze!
What is funny, is that turning off the display of resulting ball positions from mulligan shots in the game's menu still does not prevent the game from continuesly displaying each outcome of the taken mulligans on the ground where you hit the ball - see how it gets littered in front of the golfer!
(Again, possibly, too many mulligans might cause a memory leak and thus freeze or crash.)


[EDIT: Disregard the following final note, please. See this post of mine for clarification on the potential benefit of the current 1.35 hotfix patch!]

Final, final note:
My attempts to using the post-release hotfix [patch_links_ls_1998_edition_1.35_(47477)_to_1.35_hotfix_(48227)] as a patch on top of the original 1.35 GOG installation both with or without initial launch of the game (and likewise with and without changing any wrapper settings or ingame options) does render the game completely non-functional for me and requires a clean uninstallation and reinstallation to start the program again.

Maybe, those observations help some of you to enjoy the game or at least for a while longer.

Kind regards,
foxgog

[Edit: New findings regarding the use of the 1.35 hotfix patch]

i got it working on my laptop by using dgVoodoo2 wrapper (i can't post link but the version i used was latest 2.75. i just copy/pasted all the folders/files from the voodoo folder into the Links LS98 game folder then started the game using linksls98.exe. no crashes for about 2 hours so far.