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Troubleshooting / Common Errors

There are many bugs and oddities you might encounter when playing Quake. If you think that a certain one is missing below, please add it.

Hard crashes

Quake returns to the operating system with an error message or does not even seem to start at all.

Hunc_Alloc: Failed on ####### bytes

The game does not have enough memory allocated to load the map. This usually happens with very large maps. To be able to load it, the memory heap has to be increased manually by using the -heapsize # command line parameter when starting the game. For example: glquake.exe -heapsize 64000. For software rendered engines the commandline parameter is -mem # where # is the amount of RAM in megabytes, eg -mem 64.

A required .DLL file, GLIDE2X.DLL, was not found

Unless you are using a 3Dfx graphics card (you would know if you do so) this means that you should just go ahead and delete the file opengl32.dll from your Quake directory.

Soft crashes

Quake drops to the console with an error message.

Other problems

Quake is too damn dark

Quake is a dark game. Not being able to see much is part of its atmosphere and you should keep it that way. If you are using one of the Recommended Quake Engines then you can use the gamma slider in the menu. Do not use the idgamma tool.

The screen is green and distorted

You are using an ATI graphics chip? Add -bpp 32 to your commandline to force the engine to use 32 bit color depth.

Random things

  • If there are fishes in the map, the monster kill statistics in the transmission screen will be wrong.
  • Jumping monsters like fiends and dogs can get stuck.
  • Jumping monsters can instantly kill you if they land on your head. Keep your distance, Mario!
  • You cannot look up or down straight.
  • Vores' magic missiles argh can damage themselves.
  • You cannot blow up fallen zombies.
  • Grenades will be stuck if you fire them downwards on to a slope.
  • Falling down always takes 5 health points (unless the mapper decided otherwise).
  • The rocket launcher is rather inefficient against Shamblers.