Unable to locate draw buffer...

[Random Entity]

...terminating program. Anyone else get this error message? I'm running a 1 Ghz Athlon PC with Windows Me installed. The game runs fine for a while, then I get this message and I'm unable to play unless I restart the computer. I was wondering if anyone had a possible solution for it.

[spicytimothy]

oh yeah... I got the same problem too...

[yin26]

Well, add me to the list. I'm searching for an answer. About how long can you play before the crash, and what are you normally doing at the time. For me, I can't play more than 5 minutes ...

[Random Entity]

I play for about five minutes too. The thing is, this error ocurrs at seemingly random times. The last two times it happened I was moving an archer across desert terrain, and fiddling with production orders in the city window. I've already e-mailed Firaxis about this, and checked the FAQ, but have yet to find a solution.

[yin26]

I just updated the driver on my Radeon DDR 32 Mb. Seemed to fix it ... but perhaps I was just lucky. I played for 15 minutes just now with no problem. Do you have the same card, maybe?

[Random Entity]

As a matter of fact, I do. Unfortunately I'm also pretty technically inept. How would I go about updating the drivers?

[yin26]

I'll getcha the link! One moment...

[yin26]

Go here. You'll notice the "I agree" button all the way at the bottom of the page. Simply download the file and run it. Just let it choose its default folder at the start of installing, etc., and it will do the rest for you. You'll then need to reboot.

Go try it and tell me if that works!

[moondog]

Yeah i'm getting that msg. also! but i have a inno3d tornadio geforce2 gts pro. I also changed the drivers and that's when I started to get the msg....

[yin26]

Sounds like you need to actually roll your driver back.

[Utrecht]

This problems has been diescussed multimple times on the forum.

The short answer is this:

1) reduce the number of background applications running. Civ is a resource pig and needs as much systme resources as possible

2) Reduce the number of fonts in yoour font directory to less than 256 or so - more than that and civ seems to have difficulty recognizing the Lucinda font that it uses

Good luck - in the future please use the search capability to see if others have reported similar issues.

[yin26]

This problem had NOTHING to do with fonts. This is a card-specific issue relating to a driver update. Also, I have left ALL my apps running in the background and have no problems.

[yin26]

But I should say: The things you suggest seem to help people with different configurations.

[Random Entity]

Crap... I can't update my driver because they don't have one with BIOS number 113-76801-100 on the site. It suggests e-mailing them, but I can't get that to work either.

[yin26]

BIOS number? Hmmm, did that happen to you when you tried installing? Otherwise I just installed the one on that site, with no problems.