lock up

[e8sniper]

I have just reinstalled civ3 and it locks up at the first picture screen. I have way more computer than it would take to run the game. I am also using windows me. I have tried uninstalling and then reinstalling but no luck. any ideas? thanks

[Pythagoras]

Do you mean the title screen or the video?

And we'll need sys. specs.

[Ninot]

agreed, its probably something like system specs, or did you fool around in the editor? what screen?

[Ethelred]

Re: lock up

Originally posted by e8sniper
I have just reinstalled civ3 and it locks up at the first picture screen. I have way more computer than it would take to run the game. I am also using windows me. I have tried uninstalling and then reinstalling but no luck. any ideas? thanks

Make sure you have the latest drivers for your video card. Half the people making this complaint have NEVER updated their drivers or are deliberatly using an old driver because they prefer it for some specific game.

Have you patched the game? Get the 1.21f patch. The original version of the game had problem with some versions of the Nvidia detonator drivers.


ALLWAYS give your bloody specs when you ask for this kind of help. For all we know you are trying to run the game on a Pentium Pro at 200 Mhz and 32 megs of RAM with a trident 2 meg video card and an ISA bus Soundblaster 16 using a hacked version of Windows 3.11.

[HeinusHoratius]

I miss my Civ3!!!

I have the same problem as e8sniper. Civ3 worked fine, untill I needed to reinstall windows98. Now it locks up at the first screen. (The splash thingy that should dissappear after a couple of seconds.) Meanwhile the cd-rom drive stops reacting. (The light is on, so it must be doing something ...
I have the latest patch (121f) installed and my sound/video drivers are updated.

My pc:
Pentium II
64MB Ram
Windows98

If anyone has any ideas, PLEASE let me know! I miss my civ3!!!

[zulu9812]

what processor speed at pentium II? And 64 meg RAM is quite low, despite what the official minimum specs are..

[Ethelred]

Make sure you are trying to run it from the CD drive you istalled it from. If you have two drives than unistall and try the other CD drive.

See if you the Bink program installed. If so uninstall it. For some reason it gives can cause the game to hang when running the .bic videos. Weird but true. It happened to me.

Have a second program open. Explorer will do fine. This way you can switch to something and maybe see what is going on. That is how I discovered the Bink problem.

Another thing you can try is to RENAME the videos. If the game can't find them it will just ignore them and go on according what someone said. I don't know myself I am using the Security Briefing since it loads faster. All that is needed it to rename it opening movie to do that.

I am pretty sure that will not work though if you haven't done a full install.

Make sure the CD is clean. Especially if you didn't do a full install.


REPORT BACK. Some people ask and never tell what happened so we don't get the feedback we need to help others.

[HeinusHoratius]

Zulu9812: I don't know the speed of my pc. It's not very fast, but fast enough to play civ3. I did it before!

Ethelred:
1) I have only one cd-rom drive, so it can not be in conflict with others.
2) Is the bink program installed with civ3? I have not installed it otherwise. Anyway, I can not check it with the alt-tab. Alt-ctrl-del is the only combination that seems to work. (Eventually...)
3) I also tried a full install with de movies renamed. No effect...
4) The cd-rom is clean.

The only thing I can come up with are the cd-rom drivers. I have a sony ddu220e dvd-player. According to sony it should work fine with standard (microsoft) drivers. I tried to find these specific drivers on the net, but they are quite elusive...

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by HeinusHoratius
1) I have only one cd-rom drive, so it can not be in conflict with others.

Its not a conflict. Its a case of the program wanting

A. The same drive letters - which should not be a problem in your case

B. Some drives just don't like SafeDisk II so that is why I suggested trying another drive if you have one.

2) Is the bink program installed with civ3? I have not installed it otherwise.

Civ III uses a Bink library. If you didn't download the Bink SDK like a number of people did (me included) to see the Security Briefing movie then you should not have the conflict. UNLESS another program is using the Bink software and it installed a conflicting DLL.

Anyway, I can not check it with the alt-tab. Alt-ctrl-del is the only combination that seems to work.

That is because you don't have another program running. I have found that the error popups often do not show with Direct X games. They stay hidden behind the overlay and if I have another program running I can alt-tab to it and THEN I see the error popup. I am pretty sure this is how I found out about the Bink DLL problem I was having.

(Eventually...)
3) I also tried a full install with de movies renamed. No effect...
4) The cd-rom is clean.

It was worth a try. I am not sure it works though. I can't check at the moment because I don't have Civ III installed. I just reinstalled XP yesterday and I am still reinstalling stuff.

The only thing I can come up with are the cd-rom drivers. I have a sony ddu220e dvd-player. According to sony it should work fine with standard (microsoft) drivers. I tried to find these specific drivers on the net, but they are quite elusive...

Someone did have a problem that was corrected with a firmware upgrade anyway. However I can't find such a thing at sony.com. I think your drive is discontinued as I didn't see it mentioned with the DVD drives.

[HeinusHoratius]

LoL! I know my drive is discontinued! But there should be drivers somewhere...

As for the alt-tabbing: I tried running a dos-program at the same time (which does not use directx, no way! ) The dos program worked fine, but alt-tabbing did not. (Normally it does, I checked beforehand). When I quit the dos-program I arrived back at my (frozen) desktop with the civ-splash screen...

I am getting more and more convinced it has something to do with the cd-rom drivers...

[e8sniper]

system specs:
1.4ghz 266fsb tbird
512megs of 2100ddr
elsa 920 gladiac gf3
soundblaster x-gamer
epox 8k7a+ mb with onboard raid
windows me
probably something else that I can't remember right now
also I can't seem to upgrade to xp and I suspect it has to do with the raid.
I tried a reformat and install before any norton software was loaded but it would lock up at the first firaxis screen.

[Ethelred]

I tried a reformat and install before any norton software was loaded but it would lock up at the first firaxis screen.

I can help with the OTHER problem but this first as this is a Civ site.

You didn't need to reformat for the game. Or XP. Unless your hard drive is full of bad sectors. Installing a game with things like Norton off is not a bad idea. Sometime Norton will cause difficulties with a few programs installing. I don't think Civ III is one of those.

You have the same problem as the other guy. All the things I said there go for you. Make sure your drivers up to date. Get the latest Direct X. Don't have the Bink SDK installed. Go to Nvidia.com and make SURE its the latest drivers that you are using.

Try seting your monitor refresh rate at 60 but that realy shouldn't be the problem.

If you try those things and still have a problem my bet is the CD ROM drive. Safedisk II causes problems with some drives. Especially older drives and it doesn't have to be a 4X drive from the Civ II era to be problematic.

You could try the NOCD stuff. You will have to search that out yourself.

Now for the easy one. XP MUST have the drivers for the RAID device BEFORE it can install. Its in the instructions somewhere but what you need to do is

Download the latest RAID drivers for your device. They MUST be put on a FLOPPY. The inf file MUST be in the root of the FLOPPY. You MUST hit the F6 key shortly after the prompt flashes by almost faster than you can see. XP cannot see your hard drives without this floppy.

KEEP THE FLOPPY IN A SAFE PLACE. MAKE COPIES. If you have a problem that could be fixed with the CD it will do you no good without the driver floppy.

[HeinusHoratius]

You have the same problem as the other guy.

The other guy??? Please! My computer may be so old that even the ancient Egyptians are familiar with it, but I do have a name:

Heinus Horatius, Imperator Romanum, Rex Galliae et Brittanniae, Pharaonis Aegyptianus, etc. etc. etc.

(Little exaggeration never hurt anyone. )

Back to the civ-problem:
I found the cd-rom drivers, but they were only for DOS. They would not even install when I booted in pure DOS-mode.

So, what do you reckon? Should I give up on this cd-rom drive and buy a new one???

[Ethelred]

Well you can get a 10X DVD fairly cheap these days. I bought one just to get the Power DVD software that came with it. The cheap generic one is quieter than my more expensive Pioneer anyway.

I don't know that its the DVD ROM but it is likely. If you can borrow a new one from someone you could be sure.

Yes the downloadable drivers are for DOS. Firmware is for everything though. However there is no firmware update for you drive. Not my generic drive either but I did update the firmware on my Pioneer 10X DVD twice. Had to been done in DOS with that drive.

Anyway you can try the suggestion I gave to the alter-guy. The NOCD software. I cannot say where to get it. I don't know offhand and it upsets Mark as its often used by pirates despite it having legitmate uses. Just do a search. Its likely that it will take care of the problem for you. At least if its the DVD that is.

[e8sniper]

I loaded civ3 with my plextor 24/10/40 cdrw and it works like a champ. My other drive is a kenwood 72x which seemed to be the problem but I don't know why.