Cause: MSVC 6 handles templates in a substandard way: it requires all template arguments to a function to be reflected in the argument list. We wrap them in the type of a dummy argument. This increases the required heap size at compilation significantly.

Solution: edit the project properties of SDLVideo (C/C++/General settings), /Zm150 works.

Cause: Your openal still uses oss and the new ubuntu pulled oss support

Solution: First try to reconfigure openal to use pulse audio (alsoft-conf) If that doesn't help, or you get an error like “Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-close.c: 759: _dl_close: Assertion `map→l_init_called' failed!” Then pull the newest openal source from the git repository and recompile.

Cause: SDL 1.2.13 on Windows has a bug, which was fixed in Revision #3533. If this happens to you, download the SDL source, and fix SDL_dibvideo.

Solution: Look for the line:

video->flags |= SDL_HWPALETTE;

Either remove it, or alter it like this:

if ( screen_pal) {
  video->flags |= SDL_HWPALETTE;
}

You can also try other versions of SDL.

Possible cause: You clicked on another window, pushing the initializing game into background. This causes OpenAL to fail opening the sound device, which causes GemRB to fail startup.

Solution: Try running again, without clicking too wildly.

Possible cause: You have stale .pyc files. Or even .py files that no longer needed.

Solution: Delete all .pyc files before running GemRB. Make sure you don't have excess files.

Possible cause: You have got a wrong version of OpenAL.

Solution: Install OpenAL Soft 15.1. The best is if you copy soft_oal.dll as OpenAL32.dll somewhere on your game's dll path.