Tweet
My wife has an HP laptop with ATI mobility 9000/9100 IGP graphics, so I suspected I might need to tinker a bit to make Civ 4 run on her laptop. So, install DX, run the game, and while it's doing that "quick" check where it parses the XML and sound and such, it would drop to desktop without a single error on the screen.
This may sound familiar, because it is. The debug log showed that it couldn't find the crc.dat file so would exit.
So, update the Microsoft XML parser, reboot, no change. Can't use the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI because they don't support the HP implementation of this mobility Radeon. Updated the sound driver, and still no change. Still dropped out, didn't even get into the main program to let me try to adjust the sound or video options.
So, there was ONE thing that a user out there discovered. While something is using the sound, like media player, as long as sound is playing while it's doing the initial check, the game will run. If media player is running but no sound is playing, the game wouldn't start, the same crash to desktop. Nasty thing, and I'm impressed that someone noticed it and found it worked.
The next problem, the game would run, but would crash. As I mentioned, ATI doesn't provide drivers for this particular laptop video. The Omega Drivers DO work on it though. And in this case, all I had to do was uninstall the ATI drivers through add/remove programs, reboot, install the Omega Drivers version, and after rebooting again, and dealing with the sound issue, the game ran fine on medium graphics, though it's a bit slow.
Note that once you get into the game, you can alt-tab back out and turn off media player(or hit stop) or whatever you use, then go back into the game.
From this, the problems that many are running into are primarily related to the initial check the game makes to verify what video/audio equipment you have in your machine. True, there may be further driver issues and/or bugs to deal with, but that's a normal issue with most games not working for a number of people. I havn't seen a game released in the past five years with 3D graphics that didn't have SOME problems for a group of people.
I hope this will help some. The Omega Drivers can be found at http://www.omegadrivers.net
This may sound familiar, because it is. The debug log showed that it couldn't find the crc.dat file so would exit.
So, update the Microsoft XML parser, reboot, no change. Can't use the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI because they don't support the HP implementation of this mobility Radeon. Updated the sound driver, and still no change. Still dropped out, didn't even get into the main program to let me try to adjust the sound or video options.
So, there was ONE thing that a user out there discovered. While something is using the sound, like media player, as long as sound is playing while it's doing the initial check, the game will run. If media player is running but no sound is playing, the game wouldn't start, the same crash to desktop. Nasty thing, and I'm impressed that someone noticed it and found it worked.
The next problem, the game would run, but would crash. As I mentioned, ATI doesn't provide drivers for this particular laptop video. The Omega Drivers DO work on it though. And in this case, all I had to do was uninstall the ATI drivers through add/remove programs, reboot, install the Omega Drivers version, and after rebooting again, and dealing with the sound issue, the game ran fine on medium graphics, though it's a bit slow.
Note that once you get into the game, you can alt-tab back out and turn off media player(or hit stop) or whatever you use, then go back into the game.
From this, the problems that many are running into are primarily related to the initial check the game makes to verify what video/audio equipment you have in your machine. True, there may be further driver issues and/or bugs to deal with, but that's a normal issue with most games not working for a number of people. I havn't seen a game released in the past five years with 3D graphics that didn't have SOME problems for a group of people.
I hope this will help some. The Omega Drivers can be found at http://www.omegadrivers.net
Comment