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LucasArts Shadows of the Empire Not Working Right on "New" System
I'm in the process of copying my Windows 98 SE installation from an old
computer to a somewhat newer model, and I find that GLquake (I) looks better (fog actually works right) but has a slightly lower framerate, but Shadows of the Empire does not work properly. Starting the game, the overlayed yellow text "crawl to infinity" does not appear over the star background. Entering the first level, the only things visible are the background sky and snow textures on flat surfaces, plus the overlays when in first-person view. No friendly, enemy, laser, terrain contour, or other 3D models appear. Running the Shadows.exe file directly to access the FPS test sequence gives a solid bluish-white screen, though the music and blaster sounds can be heard and the test terminates normally, giving a somewhat reasonable 37.2 FPS or so. I have tried both the original and patch 1.1 SOTE executable files with the same results. Computers: original- 1996 vintage Packard Bell PB680 (=Intel Orlando/Tampa) mb w/ MR BIOS, PowerLeap adapter, AMD K6-III 400 MHz CPU, Voodoo3 3000, DirectX 9.0c (also worked properly under 7, 8.0a, and 9.0a), 128MB RAM "new"- ASUS A7V400-MX mb, Phoenix BIOS 1009, AMD Sempron 2800+ 2.0 GHz CPU, onboard VIA/S3 KM400a UniChrome graphics (drivers 4.14.10.39 and 4.14.10.45 tried), DirectX 9.0c, 512MB RAM I can't figure out if this problem is in the game software, drivers, hardware, mb BIOS settings or what. I'm on the edge of trying the Voodoo3 in the new system, but swapping it over will be a bit of a PITA and I don't see how it can possibly be any better than the ASUS onbard video - isn't the Voodoo several years older? Please help. TIA -- -------------------- Alan "A.J." Franzman Email: a.j.franzman [ A T ] verizon [ D O T ] net -------------------- |
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In article 5dXae.2798$Yc.1663@trnddc06, "Alan 'A.J.' Franzman"
wrote: I'm in the process of copying my Windows 98 SE installation from an old computer to a somewhat newer model, and I find that GLquake (I) looks better (fog actually works right) but has a slightly lower framerate, but Shadows of the Empire does not work properly. Starting the game, the overlayed yellow text "crawl to infinity" does not appear over the star background. Entering the first level, the only things visible are the background sky and snow textures on flat surfaces, plus the overlays when in first-person view. No friendly, enemy, laser, terrain contour, or other 3D models appear. Running the Shadows.exe file directly to access the FPS test sequence gives a solid bluish-white screen, though the music and blaster sounds can be heard and the test terminates normally, giving a somewhat reasonable 37.2 FPS or so. I have tried both the original and patch 1.1 SOTE executable files with the same results. Computers: original- 1996 vintage Packard Bell PB680 (=Intel Orlando/Tampa) mb w/ MR BIOS, PowerLeap adapter, AMD K6-III 400 MHz CPU, Voodoo3 3000, DirectX 9.0c (also worked properly under 7, 8.0a, and 9.0a), 128MB RAM "new"- ASUS A7V400-MX mb, Phoenix BIOS 1009, AMD Sempron 2800+ 2.0 GHz CPU, onboard VIA/S3 KM400a UniChrome graphics (drivers 4.14.10.39 and 4.14.10.45 tried), DirectX 9.0c, 512MB RAM I can't figure out if this problem is in the game software, drivers, hardware, mb BIOS settings or what. I'm on the edge of trying the Voodoo3 in the new system, but swapping it over will be a bit of a PITA and I don't see how it can possibly be any better than the ASUS onbard video - isn't the Voodoo several years older? Please help. TIA Getting games to run is always a trying exercise. It took me several hours to get the last game demo I downloaded, to run properly. As you observe, the hardest part is the not knowing what exactly is busted in your configuration. Built-in graphics, like the Unichrome, are not usually leading edge designs. Due to the power constraints, the Northbridge only has room for a few watts worth of digital circuitry, which will not be able to compete with 70 watt high end video cards. One problem with the built-in graphics, is you sometimes cannot get any concrete info as to exactly what level of hardware support is in there. I would expect a built-in to have T&L and maybe hardware support for DirectX 7 - and that is likely enough for your game. One issue with games, is the graphics API used. Games can use Glide (3DFX proprietary), D3D (Microsoft), or OpenGL. You will find occasional skunkworks efforts, to make translation software, like MESA offered to give OpenGL abilities, and I think there might also be the odd Glide project around somewhere (openGlide? - search on sourceforge.net). If your game was using Glide on the Voodoo3, Glide will not exist on your KM400. Only one of the shunkworks projects can add missing APIs. In the little reading I've done on the subject, it seems D3D is supposed to emulate missing functionality, while OpenGL drivers declare what functions exist, and then a game can use an alternate rendering method if something is missing. In terms of drivers, I see 98&me5-10-146-0.zip and 4IN1.zip : http://au.asus.com/support/download/...00-MX&Type=All This page explains what you get in the Via chipset drivers 4IN1: http://downloads.viaarena.com/driver...nGuide2005.htm When you moved the disk from the old computer to the new, did you uninstall the old video card software, just before shutting down the old PC for the last time ? When moving disks from one machine to another, I like to have a scratch disk, so I can clone a backup copy, in case of emergencies. Then, if a transition step needs to be redone, I have something to work with. Removing the old video driver, will result in the new machine booting in some 640x480 VGA mode, but as soon as your chipset drivers and video driver are added, the functionality should improve. One thing I'm not sure of, is how the built-in graphics hardware looks like to a game. For example, if you plug in a 3D graphics card into the AGP slot, the AGP bridge gets used on the Northbridge, and there is an AGP GART driver, where the GART translates AGP addresses from the video card, into addresses inside main memory. The built-in graphics may not go through the same translation steps, and since some games seem to know a little too much about the hardware underneath, this may prevent certain games from running properly, if at all. On one of my older computers, I do remember one game demo ending up with a lot of graphics distortions, after I upgraded DirectX versions, so I could run another game. And Microsoft doesn't officially spport downgrading to older versions, so a clean install is the only practical answer for that. So much for backward compatibility... This article discusses the state of integrated graphics. While the KM400 is not discussed here, it will have similar performance characteristics to other built-in graphics solutions. (I cannot find a spec for the KM400, that describes its feature set in any detail, so this is as close as I can get.) http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...903/index.html As for your Voodoo3 3000, in Google I see mention of both PCI slot and AGP slot versions of the card. Apparently, 3DFX didn't really use the AGP features that much, so the AGP slot was likely only offering a little extra bandwidth for commands and data. From a slot perspective, if your card is an AGP card, your AGP card will have a slot cut in the edge card, indicating operation at 3.3V only. The AGP slot in your motherboard has a key for 1.5V only (or universal card) operation. A 3.3V card should not plug in there, due to the key preventing it. If your Voodoo card is PCI, then there won't be any drama. (Don't forget to unplug the computer, before adding or removing any hardware - unplugging prevents damage via +5VSB.) If gaming is important to you, you could get a low end AGP video card, starting at about $50-$60. There is a list here, that allows comparison of basic features. To do better than your built-in graphics, I would want a card with DirectX9 hardware support (something that might come in handy if you were to run Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn operating system). This page lists the characteristics of the cards. If the first link is dead, use the archived version. A card better than or equal to Radeon 9500 is an option, while in the Nvidia camp, an FX5200 or better would work. (I have a FX5200 in one of my computers, and it is not a high performance card, by any stretch of the imagination. I got it because it is fanless, so allows a quiet office PC to be constructed. I've tried a couple of old games and it wasn't too bad with those.) The DirectX9 cards differ in which version of programmable vertex and pixel shaders they use, and the supported version is shown at the bottom of this page. http://www.benchmark.pl/artykuly/zes...ydajnosci.html http://web.archive.org/web/200410120...ydajnosci.html This article will allow you to rate the actual performance of the cards: http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...004/index.html Maybe you could try running DXdiag from Start/Run ? Dxdiag is included with DirectX, and has some test buttons you can play with. Maybe Sisoft Sandra or Lavalys Everest utilities can tell you more about your hardware. HTH, Paul |
#3
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"Paul" wrote in message
: In article 5dXae.2798$Yc.1663@trnddc06, "Alan 'A.J.' Franzman" wrote: I'm in the process of copying my Windows 98 SE installation from an old computer to a somewhat newer model, and I find that GLquake (I) looks better (fog actually works right) but has a slightly lower framerate, but Shadows of the Empire does not work properly. Starting the game, the overlayed yellow text "crawl to infinity" does not appear over the star background. Entering the first level, the only things visible are the background sky and snow textures on flat surfaces, plus the overlays when in first-person view. No friendly, enemy, laser, terrain contour, or other 3D models appear. Running the Shadows.exe file directly to access the FPS test sequence gives a solid bluish-white screen, though the music and blaster sounds can be heard and the test terminates normally, giving a somewhat reasonable 37.2 FPS or so. I have tried both the original and patch 1.1 SOTE executable files with the same results. Computers: original- 1996 vintage Packard Bell PB680 (=Intel Orlando/Tampa) mb w/ MR BIOS, PowerLeap adapter, AMD K6-III 400 MHz CPU, Voodoo3 3000, DirectX 9.0c (also worked properly under 7, 8.0a, and 9.0a), 128MB RAM "new"- ASUS A7V400-MX mb, Phoenix BIOS 1009, AMD Sempron 2800+ 2.0 GHz CPU, onboard VIA/S3 KM400a UniChrome graphics (drivers 4.14.10.39 and 4.14.10.45 tried), DirectX 9.0c, 512MB RAM I can't figure out if this problem is in the game software, drivers, hardware, mb BIOS settings or what. I'm on the edge of trying the Voodoo3 in the new system, but swapping it over will be a bit of a PITA and I don't see how it can possibly be any better than the ASUS onbard video - isn't the Voodoo several years older? Please help. TIA snip Built-in graphics, like the Unichrome, are not usually leading edge designs. Due to the power constraints, the Northbridge only has room for a few watts worth of digital circuitry, which will not be able to compete with 70 watt high end video cards. One problem with the built-in graphics, is you sometimes cannot get any concrete info as to exactly what level of hardware support is in there. I would expect a built-in to have T&L and maybe hardware support for DirectX 7 - and that is likely enough for your game. One issue with games, is the graphics API used. Games can use Glide (3DFX proprietary), D3D (Microsoft), or OpenGL. You will find occasional skunkworks efforts, to make translation software, like MESA offered to give OpenGL abilities, and I think there might also be the odd Glide project around somewhere (openGlide? - search on sourceforge.net). The only info I can get from the box is that it requires DirectX 5 (included on game CD), so it does not appear to be a Glide or OpenGL game. If your game was using Glide on the Voodoo3, Glide will not exist on your KM400. Only one of the shunkworks projects can add missing APIs. In the little reading I've done on the subject, it seems D3D is supposed to emulate missing functionality, while OpenGL drivers declare what functions exist, and then a game can use an alternate rendering method if something is missing. In terms of drivers, I see 98&me5-10-146-0.zip and 4IN1.zip : http://au.asus.com/support/download/...00-MX&Type=All If you go into that .zip file and view the file kmviaga.inf, you'll find that the actual graphics chipset driver version included in the file is 4.14.10.39; the same one that came with my mobo. 5.10.146.0 is the version of the installer package. Confusing, isn't it? This page explains what you get in the Via chipset drivers 4IN1: http://downloads.viaarena.com/driver...nGuide2005.htm When you moved the disk from the old computer to the new, did you uninstall the old video card software, just before shutting down the old PC for the last time ? When moving disks from one machine to another, I like to have a scratch disk, so I can clone a backup copy, in case of emergencies. Then, if a transition step needs to be redone, I have something to work with. Removing the old video driver, will result in the new machine booting in some 640x480 VGA mode, but as soon as your chipset drivers and video driver are added, the functionality should improve. Actually, I cloned the old 30 GB drive to the new 80 GB drive (in the old system). Not an exact clone of course, since the minimum cluster size is quite different - 4k on the small one vs. 32k on the big one. Then I swapped the drives in the old system and made sure the old system would boot and run properly on the new drive. Then I "made my list and checked it twice" for what needed to be uninstalled or disabled before moving the bigger drive to the new mobo, and I remember the 3dfx stuff was a large part of that. I think I did it right, had no problems during the "finding new hardware" stage of setting up on the new system. Anyway I still have the list of what I did, could dig it up if you think it would be helpful. One thing I'm not sure of, is how the built-in graphics hardware looks like to a game. For example, if you plug in a 3D graphics card into the AGP slot, the AGP bridge gets used on the Northbridge, and there is an AGP GART driver, where the GART translates AGP addresses from the video card, into addresses inside main memory. The built-in graphics may not go through the same translation steps, and since some games seem to know a little too much about the hardware underneath, this may prevent certain games from running properly, if at all. SOTE is pre-AGP; the box says "3D Accelerated PCI Graphics card required". I'm sure the game uses DirectX to access graphics functions so this shouldn't matter anyway. (?) On one of my older computers, I do remember one game demo ending up with a lot of graphics distortions, after I upgraded DirectX versions, so I could run another game. And Microsoft doesn't officially spport downgrading to older versions, so a clean install is the only practical answer for that. So much for backward compatibility... There is a program available online to uninstall it, called "DirectX Scrubber" (or "...Cleaner" or something like that), and I've seen a website that has all the redistributable DirectX installer executable versions, so going back to an earlier version is not such a big problem after all, provided the OS can run without it during the changeover. I believe Win98 is safe in that respect, possibly WinME too (as the final evolution in that product line). This article discusses the state of integrated graphics. While the KM400 is not discussed here, it will have similar performance characteristics to other built-in graphics solutions. (I cannot find a spec for the KM400, that describes its feature set in any detail, so this is as close as I can get.) http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...903/index.html As for your Voodoo3 3000, in Google I see mention of both PCI slot and AGP slot versions of the card. Apparently, 3DFX didn't really use the AGP features that much, so the AGP slot was likely only offering a little extra bandwidth for commands and data. From a slot perspective, if your card is an AGP card, your AGP card will have a slot cut in the edge card, indicating operation at 3.3V only. The AGP slot in your motherboard has a key for 1.5V only (or universal card) operation. A 3.3V card should not plug in there, due to the key preventing it. If your Voodoo card is PCI, then there won't be any drama. (Don't forget to unplug the computer, before adding or removing any hardware - unplugging prevents damage via +5VSB.) My Voodoo3 3K is PCI, the rare version with SGRAM which you probably didn't find mentioned as even existing. I remember it usually took me a while to find the right BIOS for it every time they updated... If gaming is important to you, you could get a low end AGP video card, starting at about $50-$60. There is a list here, that allows comparison of basic features. To do better than your built-in graphics, I would want a card with DirectX9 hardware support (something that might come in handy if you were to run Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn operating system). I'm trying not to spend any more money, but I do like to play the half-dozen or so older 3D games that I have now and then. If all else fails I will definitely steal the Voodoo3 from the old system (and put back one of the older cards that I have, either Savage4 or Voodoo Banshee) before buying a new card. This page lists the characteristics of the cards. If the first link is dead, use the archived version. A card better than or equal to Radeon 9500 is an option, while in the Nvidia camp, an FX5200 or better would work. (I have a FX5200 in one of my computers, and it is not a high performance card, by any stretch of the imagination. I got it because it is fanless, so allows a quiet office PC to be constructed. I've tried a couple of old games and it wasn't too bad with those.) The DirectX9 cards differ in which version of programmable vertex and pixel shaders they use, and the supported version is shown at the bottom of this page. http://www.benchmark.pl/artykuly/zes...ydajnosci.html http://web.archive.org/web/200410120...ydajnosci.html This article will allow you to rate the actual performance of the cards: http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...004/index.html Maybe you could try running DXdiag from Start/Run ? Dxdiag is included with DirectX, and has some test buttons you can play with. Maybe Sisoft Sandra or Lavalys Everest utilities can tell you more about your hardware. I've done the DXdiag bit already, it finds no problems and all tests work perfectly. HTH, Paul Not much help so far, but thanks for trying. -- -------------------- Alan "A.J." Franzman Email: a.j.franzman [ A T ] verizon [ D O T ] net -------------------- |
#4
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In article q8Dbe.12030$Nc.5281@trnddc09, "Alan 'A.J.' Franzman"
wrote: The only info I can get from the box is that it requires DirectX 5 (included on game CD), so it does not appear to be a Glide or OpenGL game. ... If you go into that .zip file and view the file kmviaga.inf, you'll find that the actual graphics chipset driver version included in the file is 4.14.10.39; the same one that came with my mobo. 5.10.146.0 is the version of the installer package. Confusing, isn't it? ... Actually, I cloned the old 30 GB drive to the new 80 GB drive (in the old system). Not an exact clone of course, since the minimum cluster size is quite different - 4k on the small one vs. 32k on the big one. Then I swapped the drives in the old system and made sure the old system would boot and run properly on the new drive. Then I "made my list and checked it twice" for what needed to be uninstalled or disabled before moving the bigger drive to the new mobo, and I remember the 3dfx stuff was a large part of that. I think I did it right, had no problems during the "finding new hardware" stage of setting up on the new system. Anyway I still have the list of what I did, could dig it up if you think it would be helpful. ... SOTE is pre-AGP; the box says "3D Accelerated PCI Graphics card required". I'm sure the game uses DirectX to access graphics functions so this shouldn't matter anyway. (?) ... There is a program available online to uninstall it, called "DirectX Scrubber" (or "...Cleaner" or something like that), and I've seen a website that has all the redistributable DirectX installer executable versions, so going back to an earlier version is not such a big problem after all, provided the OS can run without it during the changeover. I believe Win98 is safe in that respect, possibly WinME too (as the final evolution in that product line). ... My Voodoo3 3K is PCI, the rare version with SGRAM which you probably didn't find mentioned as even existing. I remember it usually took me a while to find the right BIOS for it every time they updated... ... I'm trying not to spend any more money, but I do like to play the half-dozen or so older 3D games that I have now and then. If all else fails I will definitely steal the Voodoo3 from the old system (and put back one of the older cards that I have, either Savage4 or Voodoo Banshee) before buying a new card. ... Not much help so far, but thanks for trying. Interesting. You can still get a demo version of the game. ftp://ftp.lucasarts.com/demos/pc/shadowsdemo.exe (~7MB) I tried it, and the yellow text scrolls up the screen just fine on my FX5200. I notice the game has a setting "force no alpha", and it could be the text is using the alpha overlay plane. It is about the only coincidence I can think of. Using the free Everest Home edition from here, http://www.lavalys.com/products/down...ng=en&pageid=3 this is what is listed for my FX5200 video card. The FX5200 is supposed to be only a couple of features short of full DirectX9 hardware support, and has vertex and pixel shader 2 support (not needed for SOTE). Perhaps you'll see some difference between what Everest reports for your built-in graphics and this video card. It might even be something as simple as color depth (16 versus 32 bit color), either in your graphics hardware, or in the choices the game is making for rendering. I don't know if there is a tool that can actually track what calls are used by a game or not. --------[ DirectX Video ]------------------------------------ [ Primary Display Driver ] DirectDraw Device Properties: DirectDraw Driver Name display DirectDraw Driver Description Primary Display Driver Hardware Driver nv4_disp.dll Hardware Description MSI MS-StarForce GeForce FX 5200 (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200) Direct3D Device Properties: Available Local Video Memory 127488 KB Available Non-Local Video Memory (AGP) 63487 KB Rendering Bit Depths 16, 32 Z-Buffer Bit Depths 16, 24 Min Texture Size 1 x 1 Max Texture Size 4096 x 4096 Vertex Shader Version 2.0 Pixel Shader Version 2.0 Direct3D Device Features: Additive Texture Blending Supported AGP Texturing Supported Anisotropic Filtering Supported Bilinear Filtering Supported Cubic Environment Mapping Supported Cubic Filtering Not Supported Decal-Alpha Texture Blending Supported Decal Texture Blending Supported Directional Lights Not Supported DirectX Texture Compression Supported DirectX Volumetric Texture Compression Not Supported Dithering Supported Dot3 Texture Blending Supported Dynamic Textures Supported Edge Antialiasing Supported Environmental Bump Mapping Supported Environmental Bump Mapping + Luminance Supported Factor Alpha Blending Supported Geometric Hidden-Surface Removal Not Supported Guard Band Supported Hardware Scene Rasterization Supported Hardware Transform & Lighting Supported Legacy Depth Bias Not Supported Mipmap LOD Bias Adjustments Supported Mipmapped Cube Textures Supported Mipmapped Volume Textures Supported Modulate-Alpha Texture Blending Supported Modulate Texture Blending Supported Non-Square Textures Supported N-Patches Not Supported Perspective Texture Correction Supported Point Lights Not Supported Point Sampling Supported Projective Textures Supported Quintic Bezier Curves & B-Splines Not Supported Range-Based Fog Supported Rectangular & Triangular Patches Not Supported Rendering In Windowed Mode Supported Scissor Test Not Supported Slope-Scale Based Depth Bias Not Supported Specular Flat Shading Supported Specular Gouraud Shading Supported Specular Phong Shading Not Supported Spherical Mapping Supported Spot Lights Not Supported Stencil Buffers Supported Sub-Pixel Accuracy Supported Table Fog Supported Texture Alpha Blending Supported Texture Clamping Supported Texture Mirroring Supported Texture Transparency Supported Texture Wrapping Supported Triangle Culling Not Supported Trilinear Filtering Supported Two-Sided Stencil Test Not Supported Vertex Alpha Blending Supported Vertex Fog Supported Vertex Tweening Not Supported Volume Textures Supported W-Based Fog Supported W-Buffering Not Supported Z-Based Fog Supported Z-Bias Supported Z-Test Supported --------[ DirectX Video ]------------------------------------ HTH, Paul |
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