Black Screen of Death

[CWrobel]

I installed Civ III Tuesday night and have not been able to get it running at all. Intro screen does not play. Screen goes black. The only way to recover is to close the task. Screen does not recover after 20 hours ( I left it running overnight just to see)

System is a Compaq 5WV254, Duron 850, 448 MB RAM, Win 2000 SP2. System is fairly loaded (CD-ROM, DR-RW, ZIP, USB Web-Cam, USB Digital Camera, Palm Pilot interface)

Video card was a no-name nVidia, but I replaced it with an ATI Radeon 7500. No change in symptoms.

Sound card is an integrated card, I don't recall the name, but it has the latest Win 2K drivers, about 2 weeks old

I had the same problem with Call to Power after I installed DirextX 8.0A, so I am pretty sure that the problem is a bad DirectX install.

DXDiag shows a number of bad or missing keys in the registry. Re-installing DirectX does not correct the problem.

I will be re-installing Win2000 sometime next week, as that is the last thing I can think of short of a clean sweep.

Anything else I can try first?

[SCLZ]

Re: Black Screen of Death

Originally posted by CWrobel

System is a Compaq 5WV254, Duron 850, 448 MB RAM, Win 2000 SP2. System is fairly loaded (CD-ROM, DR-RW, ZIP, USB Web-Cam, USB Digital Camera, Palm Pilot interface)

Anything else I can try first?

A vaguely remember hearing about this before, it might have been on the civfanatics forums. I think the solution had to do with the bink dll file. It mentions it in the readme.txt somewhere, cept it was to improve performance.

Worth a try anyways.

LZ

[CWrobel]

Well, I got it fixed... Full reinstall of Win2K. M$, in its infinite wisdom, does not allow you to uninstall or force a complete reinstall of DirectX

I assume that there are instructions for doing it somewhere, but I couldn't find them.

Anyway, it is fixed.