Just wish I could play

[AoA]

I read details on Stardocks' forums about difficulty loading up the game, but was unable to register to post a question, so I'll try here at poly to see if anyone has a thought.

First time booting up, I'm told that my video drivers are too old to play, but I figured I'd give it a shot. I'm running a Pentium 4 Toshiba laptop 2.0 Ghz, 1 Gig Ram, nVidia GeForce 460 Go 32 MB video ram Direct X 9.0 C. I appear to meet min specs according to the box.
I'm one of the ones that had the famous black terrain bug with Civ4 that was fixed with the 1.52 patch (but still have the stuttering sound during movies).

CG2 boots fine and I can pick a race and "start the game" but I get the screen telling me a hint and it says loading.....and then the game hangs. I ctrl-alt-del out and after ending the program, my PC is fine.

I could never successfully upgrade my nVidia drivers past 3.6.3.9 (year 2002) as WIndows, Toshiba and nVidia don't find a higher match. Following recommendations on stardocks site, I went to OmegaDrivers.net (I think that's the name and d'l'd 6.6.9.3 and successfully changed my driver. Only now Civ4 won't boot at all and although I can play a game of GC2, only the top left 25% of screen is shown in washed out colors (and I can't scroll the screen to see more)

After finally being able to reinstall my original drivers (the Omega deletion took out my originals too), I'm back to playing Civ4 and GC2 is back to original broken state again. No amount of changing drivers ever helped Civ4 for me.

Any thoughts? I know I'm not skilled enough to try changing my drivers again (as I almost bricked my PC)and I can clearly run Civ4 after the patch, so I do have DirectX9.0C (stardock says older drivers don't support 9.0C, thats why the game won't run). If I can register at Stardock, I'll post there but hoped someone here might know something.

I could post the debug.err if anyone's interested. Thanks for any help.

[bonscott]

Not sure what you mean by "match" your drivers, but just download the latest drivers from Nvidia. Their one driver set supports every single one of their video cards (just like ATI).

http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

The debug.err won't help you here because your problem is simply your drivers are waaaaaay too old and Stardock will tell you the same thing. You need to update them.

Oh, Stardock is a bit slow tonight because the new patch was just released about an hour or two ago.

[AoA]

By "match" I meant let me know what driver would work with my card. The times I've downloaded a new driver from nVidia in the past it says The NVidia setup could not find any drivers compatible with your software. Set up will now exit.

Well that's where I'm stuck. If nVidia can't find a compatible driver, then how can I update them. And it seems that they no longer support my GeForce 460 Go.

I was able to fianlly log on and post at Stardock though no answer yet.

[Draginol]

Yea, there's not really anything we can do. It absolutely requires recent drivers to make use of the newe 3D features.

[AoA]

Any miracle chance for a software patch to handle us old guys? Firaxis was able to find a way around the GeForce 4 Go 460's for Civ4 (which was some real crazy issues for us in that the graphics would work fine if I had a unit in the center of the map, like I said crazy)

I'm having a ball setting up my species over and over again and can only imagine what the actual game is like. I know nothing about programming but is there any way to massively bring the requirements down to specs I can use? I tried disabling all the Video options but still can not get past the loading screen.

Apparently nVidia does not support GeForce4 460 Go's and Toshiba says they don't have any other drivers

I know its a lot to ask, but I can dream. Dream, dream, dream......

[Spaced Cowboy]

I hate to say it but sounds like it is time for a new pc. Really more than 3-4 years is pushing it if you want to play the latest games.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Draginol
Yea, there's not really anything we can do. It absolutely requires recent drivers to make use of the newe 3D features.

I bought my current computer system in 2001. I currently have a 1.3GHz processor, 750MB of RAM, and a NVidea 5200card with updated drivers . While I've experienced some problems (most notably not being able to play the opening video) why I can say that I haven't experienced any CTD's, or anything worse.
If it helps at all I am playing on a large map with 6 Civs. I'm not trying anything bigger currently because I know I'm running a low end machine. FYI in case this helps.

[AoA]

I had hoped to wait until Vista came out to buy a new PC and maybe a Tablet at that....which means it likely won't have the power to run advanced games anyway.

Even then, I feel I'm wasting money buying a PC as this one works fine, better than fine and does everything I need it to do. Well, except for playing high-end games I guess, but the only games I have on it are Civ3, Civ4, SMAC, Rise of Nations and now GalCiv2. So if I could only get GalCiv2 to work, I'd be complete.

I was trying to play a small map....so large would likely be out of the question.
The big problem is I guess I can't find any updated drivers. NVidia says my card is not supported, when I download their drivers, the setup program won't let me install them, and using other sites like OmegaDrivers.net only screwed up my system.

I guess I can just hold onto the game until I buy a new PC, but I know deep down that I don't really need a new PC.

[bonscott]

Try turning off a lot of the advanced graphic features. The new patch has a bunch of options for this. I'd say turn them all off and see if the game will play for you. If it does then slowly add in more graphic options until it's unstable again then you'll know what your card can handle.

[AoA]

AHA!!!!!
Well I disabled everything, turned off anti-aliasing and dropped my resolution to the lowest 1024x768 and was able to load a Tiny universe with three races.
I think it was the anti-aliasing or the resolution.
More tests are on the way.

Thanks bonscott, you were on the money.

[Protra3211]

Well Galciv2 is in all the stores now and im wondering about one thing.
Have P4 with 512megs of ram with 128 intel video. Computor is only 6 months old. Anything I need to worry about like the intergrated video graphics.
I know upgrades cost alot and might have to wait till have the money.

[bonscott]

You definately might have an issue with the Integrated graphics (as you would with many games). Check the specs with Intel and make sure it fully supports the latest DirectX and all the advanced features like bump mapping, T&L and so forth.

Is this a laptop? If not you can pick up even an older Radeon 9800 Pro for under $100 now.

[AoA]

As I know nothing about PC set-ups, I find blind faith always works in the end. If I could run it with my ancient 2002 system just by turning it off the AA and changing the resolution with seemingly no problems now, then there's a good chance it'd work for you.

Can you run other modern games like Civ4? I had problems with both initially but both worked fine with some minor tweaks? I'd check out Stardocks web site and see if other people with set-ups similar to yours had success.
Stardocks

You can never go wrong with blind faith.

[Shadowlord]

How smooth does it run, AoA?

I'm hoping GalCiv II won't be anywhere near as graphics or memory intensive as Civ IV. Civ IV on a normal-sized map in the 1800s and 1900s uses pretty much all my available RAM and runs at 11-15 frames per second (except when I'm looking at the ocean).

My computer's specs: Athlon XP 2600+, 512 MB of RAM, GeForce FX 5600 (AGP 8x).

[AoA]

I have been able to play a small map but due to time constraints, I haven't tried a larger map. I find the game runs fairly smoothly, maybe much smoother than Civ4. I would guess that would be because much of the background is pretty static. I was able to re-enable all the graphical options except for anti-aliasing and the game looks fine with the moons orbiting palnets and shis crusing along. The few battle screens I've seen also seem to run smooth. There is some increasing delay between turns at times, but never more than a few seconds and I see it more as a hiccup because one turn later it often returns to a quicker turn change.
Civ4 also happens to run fairly smoothly for me as well though, but again I don't think I've ever played anything larger than a small map for a long time.

I don't like to expand and manage a lot of cities/planets and so tiny and small maps let me play a carefree game but keep competitive. I hear the demo's coming soon. You may want to check it for yourself.
Me, with coupons, I only paid $20 US so I was willing to take a chance and it worked. Blind faith always pays off.