Schrullenhaft

Berli - Vosages ?

You may be having a problem with your video drivers and CM. Several people have reported problems trying to switch back and forth between CM and the desktop. Make sure you are in at least 16-bit color (I don't know if CM gives you an error if your color depth is too low). You may want to check and see if there is a newer version of the driver for your video card. If you can provide some "specs" on your computer we may be able to point you to some sources.

Unfortunately... nothing. The one exception to this may be that you need to allocate more main memory to the video. I believe you can do this in the CMOS > Advanced Chipset Setup. If you set it to the maximum amount of memory (probably 8Mb), then there is a chance you may get the fog/transparency effect. But the SiS 530 chipset (which is built into your motherboard) may not support the type of transparencies that CM is using. The absence of the "fog emulation table" setting in your control panel isn't an absolute indication that fog effects aren't supported, but they may not be. If you have the latest drivers and DirectX 7.0a and still don't get transparencies (fog effects) then the hardware won't support it (or the drivers haven't been written to support it). If you really want the transparencies and fog, then you will have to get a dedicated video card. You will need to check your motherboard manual to see what bus types (i.e. - PCI or AGP) are available for a video card. Becareful in reading your manual however since it may describe your current built in video as AGP, when it is an AGP SLOT that you need. There have been several recommendations on this board for video cards and it really depends on what kind of CPU you have and how much money you are willing to spend. The NVidia TNT2 based video cards are pretty solid and relatively problem free (they are however AGP cards). If you only have a PCI bus then either a Voodoo3 2000 16Mb or a TNT PCI 16Mb would be a good bet. Ask around on the board and you will get some opinions.

This looks like a VXD for your sound card. It is interesting that there are different sizes for it. The AW724 v.1040 drivers should have had the same VXD as the Yamaha v. 1040 drivers. Hopefully your problem can be resolved by removing (which I will detail below) & reinstalling your drivers. Otherwise there may be the need for newer or older drivers. The next set of steps are a bit more drastic and involved. We have to get rid of all your AOpen drivers and references to them in the registry, etc. I'd suggest completely uninstalling your sound drivers. Goto Control Panels > Add,Remove Software control panel > and look through the list for anything associated with your AOpen drivers or your Yamaha drivers > highlight the particular software and click the Add/Remove button. This will take you through a standard uninstall routine and may or may not get all the files and registries. If nothing applicable is in this list then go to your Programs menu item and look for a group associated with your sound (again AOpen or Yamaha). Check inside any of these folders to see if there is an uninstall routine in them. If there isn't then the next step is to reboot the computer into Safe Mode. To do this you need to press the F8 key almost immediately after powering up the computer (after the memory counts or whatever), if you press this key after you see the Windows logo, then it is too late and the computer will boot normally. This should eventually bring up a character-based menu with 6 - 8 options. Select number 3 - Safe Mode (press the number 3 or use the arrow keys). Your computer will now boot up without a lot of its drivers loading up, your screen will appear smaller in resolution, etc. Now goto the Control Panel > System control panel > Device Manager tab > go to the Mutlimedia items and click the plus sign next to them > this will list out all of your drivers for sound, video capture and joystick. Delete everything that you find here (highlight the item and click the Delete key or Remove button). From here we will start editing items in the registry. This can be very dangerous to your system configuration. If something goes wrong here you will have to reinstall Windows, which I'm pretty sure is something you don't want to do over again. This step isn't absolutely necessary, but it may be a critical factor in completely uninstalling your previous drivers. Again, if you are nervous about editing and deleting enteries in the registry you're probably better off not doing it. Goto the Start Menu > Run... item > and type in regedit. This will launch the Registry Editor. It looks like Explorer's File Manager and works in a similar manner. Each of the items here is called a key. You can "open" a key by clicking on the plus sign next to it or just double clicking on it. Goto HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > and look for any entries in the left pane that mention Yamaha or AOpen. You may find nothing here, if however you do, then you will want to delete it. This won't affect much, but we may as well get rid of them. Now goto the Microsoft key under Software > Windows > Current Version > Run key. Look in the right pane and see if there is anything referencing the Yamaha or AOpen software (probably nothing). Close up the HKEY_CURRENT_USER and goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Enum > PCI (your sound card is a PCI device). Look for anything in here that may refer to your sound card. You will have to open up each of the keys below PCI and then open the subkey beneath that, then look over to the right-hand pane to see if the device is associated with your sound/joystick (look at "Class" and "DeviceDesc"). If it is then select the key in the left frame (the key in the heirarchy below PCI) and delete it. Now goto the SW subkey (same heirarchy as PCI). Do the same thing again. You may find a listing in here refering to your sound card, but becareful as some of these settings are set by and provided by Windows. Just delete the items that are associated with AOpen or Yamaha (however your sound card was described in Device Manager, etc.). Next go to the VIRTUAL subkey. In here you will probably find a listing for your soundcard's support of the game port and/or whatever emulation it may support. Delete these keys. Coming out of the ENUM key go to the SOFTWARE key. In here delete any keys referring to AOpen or Yamaha. Now go to the Microsoft subkey do as I listed above for the Microsoft subkey. The difference here is that there will be several items to check through... Run, RunOnce, RunOnceEx and RunServices. Again delete anything referring to your sound card. Next goto System subkey > Services > Class > Media. In here will be subkeys related to your sound & multimedia. Again delete any related to your sound card. The next subkey is VXD and this one I don't have very accurate instructions for. There may be a VXD for your sound card listed in the subkeys or there may not be one. Usually the key will be named with the VXD's name. You probably won't find anything in this key, but look just in case. Now go to the CurrentControlSet subkey underneath the Systems key > Control > Media Properties > Midi > Ports. In here you will want to delete everything except Midi Mapper. Now go up to the Media Resources key > joystick subkey and you may have a joystick key in here that should be deleted. Goto the Mixer subkey and delete the subkey underneath that. Now go to the Wave subkey and delete the subkeys underneath them. After all of this you can now exit the Registry Editor. All changes that you have made were made "live" and no saving is necessary (which means all mistakes were saved too). Now go to your File Manager and go to the directory C:\WINDOWS\INF\OTHER in here we need to find .inf files that reference your sound cards. The names of the .inf files usually should be a good indicator of what they're to be used with. After deleting these .infs (don't delete everything you find here, these .infs are for devices that don't have drivers that Microsoft supports off the Win98 CD). Make sure that you have extracted the files for your sound card to a directory you are familiar with. Now reboot your computer and it should detect your sound card. It probably won't know what it is so it will ask for drivers. Point Windows to the directory you extracted your drivers to and everything should install from here. If your problem happens again, then it may be an issue between the latest version of the drivers and CM. In this case you will need to download an older version (I'm not sure if Yamaha has an FTP site with older versions of their card) possibly from AOpen. There can also be the possibility that your audio card is sharing its IRQ and the driver may not cooperate with that scheme.

Not a lot of confidence in your alma mater ? Uh.. this is a bit of a mess, but hopefully something here is useful to you. Read through it first before performing the actions. I assume you are using a PC and have an utility to unzip the mods. I would suggest creating a separate directory for the mods wherever you want. You may want to make subdirectories under this as "new" and "old". Unzip the mod files (I'm not sure what directory structure they have) and copy them into the "new" subdirectory. You should have files that are .bmp's and .wav's, preferably in their own directories. Here is where the process can become quite manual. If you want to preserve your old sounds and bitmaps you will want to copy them to the "old" subdirectory (in which you will want to create subdirectories of "bmp" and "wav"). Look through all the file names of the mod and look for the matching file name in the bmp or wav directory of CM (the default directory for CM under Windows is "C:PROGRAM FILES\CMBO" under here you will find the bmp and wav subdirectories). Once you've found the matching file copy it to the "old" directory. Once you have completed copying all the old files you can now copy the new mods into the appropriate subdirectories. If you left the old files in their subdirectories (which is "copying" instead of "moving") you will be asked if you want to replace the original file for every file that is copied. Say yes to these dialog boxes. Be aware that Madmatt has posted a patch for some of the audio sounds that caused some users to lock up. If you downloaded the mod after June 25th, then you should have the file already in the zip. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-29-2000).]

Be careful..... CM is actually programmed on a Mac and ported to the PC. Uh... I'm too slow at this... I'm sure the Mac wargamers out there can't stop praising BTS for creating CM. There really hasn't been anything like it on the Mac outside of TacOps and the Apple IIe's Kampfgruppe. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-29-2000).]

What would be really nice here is to have the system "lie" to you and tell you that you are facing green troops. When you attempt to take advantage of this and subsequently get the proverbial wedgie you would think twice about the data you get from the battlefield. This would be the only way I could justify having troop quality info being revealed. It's as if one of your units has reported back to you what it thinks it is facing - only to be wrong. Outside of this I would agree that it isn't something that should be so easily revealed; if at all. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-29-2000).]

I haven't played around with MS Flight Simulator, but it is possible that CM has a lot more polygons and textures on the screen than it does. With this much data being moved back and forth your video is going to draw quite a bit more slowly. It is possible that MS Flight Simulator has more optimized code than CM, but I'm more under the impression that it has to move less data than CM and can therefore draw to the screen faster. BTS may have had to make compromises in performance for the sake of compatibility - but I think that there are only a few instances of that in the code.

Your CPU is very busy drawing the screen and menus & mouse movement just compound what it has to do. Although your AMD has the "3D Now" extensions it isn't enough to help in a very significant way (those extensions compete with Intel's MMX SIMD - programs just have to be written to support their functionality). Basically, without a 3D card anything you do on the screen is going to be slow.

It seems as if people are having problems with the ATI cards primarily with transparency support (which I get with a Rage 128 Pro). They are slower than some of the top of the line cards based on NVidia and 3dfx chips. The Matrox G400s are pretty good performers, but some people have had problems with transparencies and other occasional problems. The GeForce may be a bit overpowered for your system. One user on this board claimed that they were getting low frame rates and it may have been due to a CPU that couldn't keep up with the card (transferring data to it). However, if you are thinking of upgrading your CPU/Motherboard in the near future, then the GeForce would be your best bet. Otherwise I would suggest the Winfast TNT2, which should work with your system with minimal problems. The NVidia reference drivers have been fairly problem free with CM.

Well, if you only get this problem when you ALT-Tab/Esc out of CM back to the desktop and then back again... Don't switch out of CM. I don't know how well other 3D games handle swapping from the game and back to the desktop. It seems that the S3 drivers just aren't doing a good job with their 3D video memory management of the VRAM (or something to that effect).

Did you do a full install of CM ? You may want to check out your "hard drive light" on your case to see if your pauses match your hard drive activity. This wouldn't be an issue with the PBEM password however. What video card do you have ? Newer drivers or an update to DirectX may help.

I heartily agree with Captain Foobar's suggestions. I'd like to see a "Target Lock" menu option so you could target an AFV that popped smoke. This would then either allow you to keep your main gun on the AFV (or whatever high priority threat) for when the smoke clears or attempt to fire at the last known location of the target. Hence it could either be a waste of ammo or you would spank an AFV that wasn't smart enough to maneuver after popping smoke. As it stands now the popping of smoke has a slight "gamey" feel to it that prevents the TacAI from properly engaging targets that would normally pose the highest risk (at least in the player's mind). It would also be nice to give those Veteran and above crews a bit more "selectiveness" in selecting their targets without getting overloaded with possible targets, which normally results in complete indecision to take any action. A Regular or below crew could possibly suffer indecision as the system is now, but Veteran and above crews should be more familiar with their weapon and its limitations and be more selective with their targets when presented with a "shooting gallery". That is the advantage I'd like to see in crew quality that would work for me in applying any of these items. Admittedly this will probably be hard to program into the TacAI and still allow it to handle the possibility of threats arising during the 60 seconds it is control. Charles mentioned this when he programmed in the "stickiness" of targets for the v. 1.01 patch.

Not sure of the exact solution for you. Are there any .inf files in the directory you extracted to ? If there is an .inf file then you can usually install the drivers by going to Control Panels > System > Device Manager tab > click on plus next to Multimedia and select your primary sound device, you may have several items listed (which will probably all need to be updated) > double click on the item or click the Properties button > Drivers tab > Update Driver button > Next button > select "Display List.." radio button > Have Disk button and point to the directory where your updated files are. You will be given a list of drivers there (from the inf files). Select the same device as you are updating (though with a newer date). If you see nothing here then you will be unable to updated your drivers this way. Supposedly this should start updating your drivers, but sometimes it doesn't work completely because an installer is expected to be used. Your sound card is based on the Yamaha 724 chip, which is quite common. If the AOpen drivers don't work for you, then you can download the v. 1040 drivers directly from this link to Yamaha (download the yamaha_dsxg_driver.exe file for Win9x): http://www.yamaha.com/lsi/dindex.htm With the Yamaha driver your card will no longer be identified as an AOpen AW724, but as just a Yamaha sound card. Some utilities that came with your sound card may change or not work.

It seems they solved a sort of problem with the latest WHQL Certified Matrox drivers. Whether this means that they just don't have lockups any more or if they solved the transparency issue, I don't know. G400 Thread: http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/Forum8/HTML/000021.html Matrox WHQL Drivers (pick v. 5.20.013): http://www.matrox.com/mga/drivers/certified_drivers/home.htm

I'll offer my opinion on this. A lot of problems end up being hardware and drivers that BTS can't control. Even the Mac side has a lot of variations in hardware, OS and other software that make tracking down problems a true pain. BTS has had to program around a lot of hardware issues already with CM, but this just isn't possible all of the time. To support one piece of hardware may require giving up features that the rest can support. It can become quite endless... and BTS was already being criticized by people on this board for "tweaking" the software for too long. There are bugs/features that BTS will address that are definitely resolvable within their code. The unfortunate fact comes down to buying more compatible/reliable hardware or software for a number of the problems that people see on this board. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-27-2000).]

EZJCA - unfortunately pford means that he is reading the book and not the screen. There apparently isn't a fix for the Voodoo2 RAVE drivers and the screen text. Supposedly someone from 3dfx is in contact with Charles about some of their driver incompatibilities. Whether this is something that they'll address or not in the next set of RAVE drivers they offer is yet to be determined.

Since GLIDE is a proprietary API that can legally only be used on 3dfx hardware, it is unlikely that BTS will rewrite all the graphics code to the GLIDE API (for a sizeable, but very limited audience). Especially considering the amount of problems they've had with the Voodoos supporting DirectX or RAVE. If BTS decides to support another API in future releases it will most likely be OpenGL, but that whole issue is a developer's nightmare when it comes to a cross-platform game like CM. It's hard to believe that your games look better on a Voodoo2 SLI than on a GeForce 256. The GeForce can do 32-bit color while the Voodoos (1 & 2) are limited to 16-bit color in their API/hardware (to my knowledge). Maybe the games you have were initially and primarily developed for GLIDE. The DirectX versions probably didn't get the development time so they may not look as good or play as fast since DirectX is a bit of a "slow gorilla" (but has more features). That would be a developer decision. [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-27-2000).]

When you lock up is the sound still coming from your speakers ? You may want to play with the "audio acceleration" slider in your Multimedia control panel (Multimedia control panel > audio tab > Advanced properties button in Playback area > Performance tab > Hardware acceleration slider in Audio Playback section). If you know what audio card/sound chip you have you may want to check and see if there are any driver updates (which may fix or make your problems worse - crapshot on that one).

What do the graphics look like when you come back in ? What color depth are you running at ? I'd suggest trying 24/32 bit color (assuming that you're seeing "psychadelic" colors). Do you ever have other programs open when you go back into CM ?

What mouse drivers are you both using ? If possible you may want to use the default drivers from Windows 9x (if your mouse can be supported by them). A generic PS/2 driver might clear the problem up. As for the "box" that jheydt is seeing, this may be related to the video driver. I would suggest updating your mouse and video drivers if you are not already using the latest. If this doesn't fix the problem, then uninstall your mouse drivers and install some generic drivers from Windows 9x.

I haven't played the designed scenarios (saving for double-blind PBEMs), so I haven't seen this. However the "armored clown car" description is damn funny and apt.

Is it hanging doing anything specific (i.e. - does it always hang playing certain sounds or running movies, during the orders phase, etc.) ? Does the game seem to hang after playing it for a certain amount of time ? If you have any details about the nature of your lockups they may help. One of the bigger differences between the Gold version and the Full version is that sound is sampled at 44kHz instead of 22kHz. This will tax your sound card a bit more and depending on your card's CPU utilization, slow down your machine (which may or may not be noticeable). If you feel that your sound card is to blame, then you may want to try the latest drivers (which you may already have) these are the AMD 3D Now enhanced drivers for Win 9x: http://www.vortexofsound.com/drivers/drv_v19x-3d.htm There is also the possibility that your sound card is sharing an IRQ with another device and the larger sound samples of the full version and pushing you system into lockup (that is strictly a guess though). You will also want to shut down any other programs running in the background. Several people have reported problems running Outlook/Express in the background and having problems.

I believe most of this wishlist will have to be applied to CM2's release. Tiles can be modified (in texture appearance), but if you modify an open-grass tile with dead cows for example, then all of your open-grass tiles would have dead cows (as far as I know). Most of the improvements are going to require modifications to the game and code, so a patch to address most of the wishlist items may be a bit beyond what BTS wants to do. However, BTS has said that they will attempt to retroactively upgrade previous versions of CM to the current version (so you may see CM1 with the features of CM2). Hopefully BTS will consider expanding the number of different tiles and the possible variety of textures for them (though this would be an extreme VRAM hog). [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 06-26-2000).]

I don't know the answer to getting your screen grabs out. But your Monster card is a 3dfx Voodoo and this is what is affecting your screen captures. Instead you are getting what the ATI video card is holding in its memory. You may want to do a search on screen captures and Voodoo cards and see if you come up with the names of some utilities to capture the screen.