Black Screen of Death Retail Version

[wilebill]

The Demo ran just fine. The retail version got to the point of giving me the license and then turned the screen black and crashed to the desktop. The screen remained black. Taskman revealed that the program was not responding. I tried reinstalling, rebooting, restarting, and of course I checked to make sure the RON folder was really thrown away after uninstalls.

The Demo ran just fine. All other major RTS's such as AOM, C&C Generals, and WarCraft III run just fine, no problems. The retail version of RON crashed to the desktop out of the box. Not nice.

The equipment is a Toshiba 1955-801 2.2 GHz P4 with 512 Meg RAM, lots of free hard disk space, all the latest upgrades from Microsoft except the problemmatical Q811493, DirectX 9.0a (checked with DxDiag, no problems), and the latest BIOS upgrade from Toshiba. Oh, yeah, the disk is defragged weekly. The video card is Nvidia GeForce4 440 Go with 32 Meg.

To make a long story short, it finally occurred to me that if the demo had run flawlessly, then what was happening was that the opening video of RON was crashing, not the game itself. After a great deal of digging around in the files in the RON directory I found rise2.ini had a toggle to turn off the opening video sequence. I edited rise2.ini to turn off the opening video sequence, and VOILA! That was it all right.

RON now runs perfectly in every respect I was able to check over the next four hours, except of course I do not see any videos!

Ahoy BHG! Not being able to see the video(s) is not going to ruin my game experience. (Stayed up until 1:30 last night playing! Yeah, it all works fine except the videos.) But can you tell me what is wrong? What is different about your video player? Videos from all the other high-end RTS's work just fine. The video in Civ III/PTW runs just fine. Your video sequence(s)? do not run at all. Period. They hang so badly I have to use Taskman to shut them down. The message in Taskman says the program is not responding.

What is going on here?

[Jerry_Garcia]

almost same prob

did all PC checks and demo ran fan last nite before i installed retail version this morning. opening movies will play right after install and go to main menu of game but when i try restarting game, i get quick black screen and then game minimizes with no recovery.

of course, there is the other problem with the conquer the world not working in retail. the other solo games work fine though. anybody got conquer the world to work?

what did you alter in your files? can you copy and paste?

[wilebill]

Your problem sounds essentially different from mine and sounds like one alluded to either in the readme.txt file or on web forums. Try cold starting your machine (leave it off for one minute) and everything should work fine. If the game seems slow after cold start, shut down the game normally and then restart it. You can run the movies, at least once, which I cannot. The movie sequence immediately hangs the program for me, instantly and on the spot in less than 1/10 second.

The file in question is rise2.ini found in the main Rise of Nations program installation directory. Make a copy of this file before you edit it. If you edit it with Notepad, make sure that you use "Save As" and put a ".ini" to the end of the file name or Notepad may save it as rise2.txt and your program will not work at all! That is why you make a copy of the file before attempting to edit it. In this file there is a line that looks something like:

ShowIntroVideo=1

Change the 1 to a zero so the line reads

ShowIntroVideo=0

then save the file as rise2.ini and restart the program. You must use a text editor or Notepad to do this. If you use Microsoft Word or any other word processor sort of program, the file will be corrupted and will not work.

Try the cold boot first. Your problem may magically evaporate! If it does not magically evaporate, post your own thread and see if you can flag down more help. New programs frequently have teething problems. I think those of us getting bit at the moment are going to have a lot of company from initial feedback. Oh ... forgot to mention ... there are also issues with the first patch ... do not download the first patch and you may keep things simpler for yourself.

[Jerry_Garcia]

i was able to figure it out

and luckily didn't have to change any files.

although it's a workaround where i have to go thru windows explore, i can start the game up in there.

[wilebill]

Starting through Explorer ... had a similar problem with Generals when it first came out, patch later fixed it.

[Jerry_Garcia]

i've gotta admit

i've played and installed lots of video games (civ2,cossacks,battlefield1942,etc) but this has been one of the biggest pain in the butt. i feel like i'm learning to install a game for the first time.

now only if they can get the conquer the world to work for me, everything will be fine.

thx for your help anyway