Start-up bug verified again.

[Sitting Bull]

This morning I installed civ3 on someone else's machine. Same problem; intro screen comes up, then nothing. Game won't start. Makes me think a lot of people could have this. Firaxis, are you getting emails about this? Throw us a bone?

[Barnacle Bill]

I had this problem myself - about 9 times out of 10 I got an "illegal operation - invalid page fault" crash right after the intro screen, before the desktop disappears to start the intro movie. The 1 time in 10, everything worked OK. Turned out to be some problem with my SCSI CD-ROM drive. Replaced it with an EIDE CD-RW drive and the problem went away.

Before discovering that, tech support had concluded the issue was a DX8 conflict with the drivers for my SoundBlaster PCI512 card. They were the latest drivers, so I tried a new SB Audigy. Now the 1 time in 10 it got into the intro movie it would lock up during the movie. If I escaped the movie before lock-up, in the game the music stuttered badly. There were no new drivers available from SB for the Audigy, and the conclusion was again driver-DX8 issues. So, now I tried an SB Live! with the latest drivers. That behaved exactly like the Audigy.

After finding the CD-ROM problem, I put the SB PCI512 back in - no more problems (discounting the crash repeatable crash in 1700 of my second game described in another thread - after 10's of hours of play to suddenly get crashes I assume is a software bug rather than a hardware/driver issue).

[Sitting Bull]

No.

No invalid page fault message. Desktop doesn't dissapear to start the intro movie.
Not 1 time in 10. Not 1 time in 100.
Haven't tried it 1000 times yet.
The intro screen comes up, then dissappears, then nothing. When I try it in safe mode, I get a message box "cannot locate cd".

[Ignis Fatuus]

Sitting Bull, your problems are related to SafeDisc2 copy protection. Get the fixed.exe patch from www.gamecopyworld.com to bypass the copy protection. I really pi$$es me off when legimate owners of the game can't play due to copy protections and have to get cracks to play the game.

[Sitting Bull]

Ignis, I tried three different cracks but they didn't run at all.
The only explanation I have is, my system is activating a bug in the software, and the cracks inherit the same bug. I'm running windows 95.

[Ignis Fatuus]

Sitting Bull,
What cracks did you try? As far as I know, you only need the fixed.exe for CivIII.

[Sitting Bull]

From gamecopyworld, one by Shayne and one by MYTH/DEViANCE, both called fixed exe. Also, someone who made their own with unsafedisc, by himself.

[cavebear]

If you are having trouble downloading the fixed.exe file from gamecopyworld, I discovered I had to use Internet Explorer; Netscape only gave me a text file that I could not save to disk properly. WinAce extracted it just fine.

I can't believe it took me over a week to get the game running!

Hooray, I'm playing!

[Swarm]

what you can do, and it worked for me was look for the file titled intro.bik, or intro.bic. remove this file, or move it to the desktop....this should alleviate that problem....

[Sitting Bull]

If the company won't say anything, maybe they won't do anything, either. I'll have to see if Amazon will take it back then. I've tried installing on two different machines, so I know they're getting calls about this. We don't even know if they're working on it.

[Sitting Bull]

The amazon website says software must still be in plastic wrap for a return. That's bad. That's really bad, because now I'm Pissed. This was a gift certificate for my birthday, ****ed up.
Let me explain how bad this is. Firaxis is now going to get FLAMED on this board. RUDELY flamed. I can't watch this board 24 hours, but whenever I stop in and see someone from the company posting, I'm going to give him ****.

[Sitting Bull]

Whoops, the board parses out obscenity. Didn't know that. I'll have to rude and offensive without swearing. Will take some thought.

[esobus]

Harsh languange is not needed, Irony will sting a lot more.

My view on copy protection is that is is a complete waste of effort.

It gets cracked, it prevents customers from doing backups, forces you to use a crack for travelling with civ3, I will not leave it at home...

Nowdays also we have regionalized software that will not install on non/us or non/ec computers. Like DVD regions but more stupid.

Just to prevent ppl from bying using the net or when travling.
Civ is a by when you pass by software. It is still eternities away
from release here.

I think you can return it, ask for a new CD on grounds of damaged goods. Then go home test and keep waltzing through their CD's until they get one that works for you or reclaims the game. It should be possible to make it not pay having bad service.

I remember the SMAC disk prot there where so many problems with the fixes that never was recompiled to work with the european version. I then vowed to never by anything but the original version of the game..

[Matthevv]

Have you tried setting the screen resolution to 1024x768 16 bit colours before trying to start Civ3? I had the same behaviour as you and this fixed it for me.