Castle of the Winds save game errors

[ve4grm]

Describe the bug

When running Castle of the Winds, we're occasionally getting errors while saving or loading. See screenshots. After the load error, OTVDM.exe becomes unresponsive and has to be force closed. On reopening the game, the save file can be loaded just fine.

Issue is sporadic, most of the time it will work fine, on occasion it gives the error.

Expected behavior Saving and loading without issue.

Screenshots Save error in-game just says "Cannot write to save file" and shows the following in the console:

Load error gives the following:

Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS: Windows 10 21H1
• OTVDM Version: 2161 / 0.8.1

Additional context When we first started using WineVDM with Castle of the Winds, we were getting occasional errors that save files were inaccessible when saving, or corrupted when loading. Moving both OTVDM and the game to 8.3 style folders seem to have solved that, but the above issue remains.

I will do my best to get a trace file to add to this. As it's not an immediate crash or a constant issue, it might take some time. Thoughts would be appreciated in the meantime.

[cracyc]

This game exercises the local heap quite a bit and there have been multiple bug related to that, see https://github.com/otya128/winevdm/issues/1127 . When you make a trace for these error, remove -local from the WINEDEBUG line so it includes local heap debug traces.

[ve4grm]

(Because I apparently didn't mention it in the first post, this is Castle of the Winds 2, not 1. Whoops! Same engine, though.)

No trace log, but some updates.

• Last few times, it's ran without crashes.
• Discovered that the "can't save" error is only while in town. Move one screen away, and it can save no problem. You don't even have to go into the shops.
• Found a new issue where on teleporting back to the dungeon, all the sprites refuse to load. This froze the game, but didn't generate a trace txt file for whatever reason. It's only happened once ever, though, so hopefully it was just a random glitch.

Will update if I'm finally able to catch a crash.