SMAX-PP vanishes on new XP Laptop

[MattyBoy]

Long time, no speak, people - and I come asking for a favour straight up

I just got a nice new laptop with the following and it does everything well except play my SMAX (Plantary Pack).

Win XP Home Edition
Version 2002 Service Pack 2
Dell Inspiron I6000
Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.6GHz
1GB RAM

I found that the game runs well until the whole SMAC process/application crashes (disappears without a trace) around about the time of the first interlude or when I have been playing for about 20 minutes.

When I saw this, I installed the patch for XP and editted AlphaCent.ini to include the following but the game still fails in the same way.

ForceOldVoxelAlgorithm=1
[Alpha Centauri]
DisableOpeningMovie=1

Any clues would be greatly appreciated.

[Senethro]

Turn off interludes, disable sound, run in compatability mode?

Just some suggestions.

[cal_01]

Check your drivers? I wouldn't be surprised if it's something to do with the video drivers.

[Urban Ranger]

Update DirectX
Update drivers

If these don't work turn off movies

[MattyBoy]

Thankyou for your responses.

I turned off all interludes and sounds (from within the game) and reproduced the problem. I am next looking into how to update DirectX (currently set to Aug 2004 version) and run in compatibility mode.

[MattyBoy]

I followed buster's earlier suggestions more closely:
- installed latest DirectX (9.0c)
- removed sound dll's
- ran in '95 (256 colour) compatibility mode, albeit with XP patch. :hmmm maybe that's a bad combination.

and got the error:
"TERRANX.ICD has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Will try all of the above, after reinstalling without the XP patch now.

[#endgame]

Crack it and/or use ds3d=0 in the AC ini file.