Windows 2003

[RedFred]

Maybe this is one for the FAQ - but I didn't see anything there.

How stable is SMAC with Win 2003? Any issues I need to know about?

Once it was loaded I got a big black screen with two outlines of rectangles. I pressed one and it launched the game. Vanilla SMAC seems stable, but I only got to 2150. On two starts with default settings I got one random research and the next not random.

The only thing I noticed that is worrying so far is that my harddrive seems awfully busy.

I look forward to your comments/fixes.

Has it really been about 10 years now since all the fun started? Who knew that no game would ever come close since.

[Petek]

I don't recall anyone running SMAC/X on Win 2003, but see no reason why it wouldn't work. As you probably know, Win 2003 is server software, not really designed to be run on a typical PC. Depending on which version you have, and how it was installed, you may have lots of unnecessary processes running in the background. That could explain the disk activity. You also could be simply running low on memory.

If not already doing so, try starting the game by executing terran.exe (instead of axstart.exe). That may bypass the problem with the black screen/rectangles. Also try changing (or adding) directdraw=x, ds3d=x and eax=x entries in the [Alpha Centauri] section of your Alpha Centauri.ini file (where each x can be either 0 or 1).

As to why the game switched from random research to directed research, no idea. However, it seems unlikely that this was caused by the OS.

[RedFred]

Thanks - I am a computer moron.

SMAC now works like a charm, perhaps better than with my last PC because now I can load maps bigger than regular sized. The random/not random research didn't repeat - likely I messed with the defaults and forgot about it.