AC crashes on startup

[lordyupa]

I recently acquired a copy of SMAC, but I cannot seem to get it to work. Every time I try to launch the program, I get a generic error saying that terran.exe has unexpectedly quit. Sometimes I get a moment of a black screen first, and sometimes I don't get even that. I am running Windows XP, and have read many, many FAQs on running SMAC under XP, but nothing has helped. The XP patch made no difference, and my INI file is nearly blank, so there is no voxel value to change. Still, I tried just adding the necessary lines, but to no effect. Does anyone know how to get around this crash?

[vyeh]

Petek has answered this question so often that he wrote an entry in The SMAC/X FAQ: COMMON QUESTIONS and their ANSWERS located at the top of this forum.

If you still have problems after reading his entry, explain what you've done and what happened. He checks this kind of thread often.