foamy

Thanks Schrullenhaft, I followed your advice and everything went just fine with the driver installation. I now have version 5.3.0.3 drivers installed for my GeForce4 Ti 4200 and so far not the slightest sign of improvement noticed.. Any level of AA screws up the text display as usual, and Anisotropic filter needs to be at 8X to get any decent display, but less then perfect performance (Jerky when smoke is present), playable but annoying.. Are there any indications that a manufacturer will come up with a good Vid card / driver combo that will give trouble free performance with the Combat Mission series of games??

I want to try the latest driver for my GeForce4 Ti 4200 and as usual I need to disable my Anti-virus program, sounds simple enough , BUT ... No matter how many buttons I go through on the Norton AV options I can't get the the darn thing to stop. (by checking processes running I see many refs to Norton AV still churning away). I have Windows 2000k and Norton 2004. Searched the Norton site - could not find anything usefull, so I return the the most helpfull site in cyber-space - Battle Front.com Tech forum. Any suggestions please ??

Thanks for the confirmation on the key strokes, this code still works on CMBO and CMBB but not on CMAK with my machine - very strange. No big deal will just have to ALT + Tab back through all my open programs to get back to the desk-top. Would be interested to know if it works on other members machines with CMAK ??

Can anyone remember the key strokes that allow one to switch directley to the Desktop?? I think it was SHIFT + ALT + : for CMBO and CMBB, does not seem to work on the CMAK demo

Yes please, I also sent you an EMail.

I just re-installed CMBO from my original disk and it comes up as Version 1.03. So I need the update patch 1.12, the Battlefront home page link to this patch does not work, does anyone know where else I can download this patch please.

Mother of all Horrors - I lost the ability to give orders. Game and files load fine, screen looks OK but when I select a unit and press the space bar no orders box appears. Also, I can't select multiple units by holding mouse key and drawing the cursor across the units. What could possibly cause this ?

Not yet mentioned is my favorite - The Hummel. It's not really a tank, but what a great weapon to destroy buildings where enemy is lurking. 150mm gun with a 200 blast, just hide it and go on a demolition frenzy, buildings turn to rubble in just a few shots from this beast - great fun, very effective and I don't think it's too gamey.

Has the subject of unit repairs in the new CMAK been discussed yet ?? For example if a Tank gets Gun Damaged in CMBO or CMBB, that's it for the rest of the game. In real war's I am sure the crews and engineers would be able to get the occaisional damaged guns back into some form of working order. So a tank could try to sit in a safe place for a few turns and maybe get back into action ?? Same for throwing a track, loosing a wheel etc.. And while I am here - Please put some decent visuals and audio back into the shell explosions, I hate the pin prick ground marks and wimpy pops that CMBB has vs CMBO - Chessy ?? maybe, but fun YES !!

Michael - - That was a very enjoyable form to read - It brought back very strong memories of those useless 18 radio sets. When I was about 10 years old my friend and I brought two sets from an Army surplus in London back in the 1950's. Got a few garbled words at 100 feet for about 20 minutes before the power gave out. Valves were so unreliable the set came with a pouch containing spares. We also bought the 38's which were much better quality but less portable. Do you have any more sources of those "After Battle Forms"

This is a really interesting and informative discussion, the problem is we all have our own ideas of what is FUN. For me, we don't need to reverse all the really great technical improvements made in CMBB, just a few simple things will do, for example; a) Reduce the Tiring and let the troops get into the action earlier. Lets have decent sized explosions and flying dirt from artillery etc. so we can see and feel the experience, c) Bring back the shock wave. d) Give troops a little "Rambo" juice so they don't all run away at the first sign of action. IMHO these modest enhancements won't make the game play "Gamey", it just adds back some excitement.

A new game from these excellent people is going to be well worth the wait, and the potential for improvements based on the past two games and input from all the good people in this circle is enormous. I just hope they will put some of the fun back that they lost with CMBB. Making it as realistic as possible sounds like a great objective, but in the end it is a game and not an army training project. As my mum used to say "All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy" Maybe a "FUN" & "REALISTIC" switch could be added ??

There was a time when I never worried about my opponents having field guns, a couple of turns with artillery or mortars and they were gone. Not so anymore, in the last few games of CMBO I am getting torn to pieces with field guns, and have wasted all my artillery on them to no effect. How can this be ?? One opponent has a gun behind a stone wall and no amount of artillery or direct shots from my Churchill can even scratch him. Anyone with good ideas or thoughts on how to remove these vermin from the battle field ??

England to Holland, now in Western Mass USA.

Seems no matter how many times I try I can't get my computer to load up an older Video card driver ?? I have Nvidia GF4 4200 on Windows 2K. Current driver is 4.0.7.2 and I am trying to put in the recommended 30.82 driver because I have read on this forum that it more reliable. (With my current driver CMBO will occaisionally shut down while I am giving units way points.) I download the 30.82 driver, unzip it and run it. All the file opening and updating things seem to go OK. Am I supposed to do something else such as remove the old driver first ??

Can CMBO gridded grass mods be used in CMBB ?? - reason for asking is that I don't see any grid mods out there that specify for use on CMBB. I don't want to use the CMBOS ?? or whatever that new-fangled mod thing is - I tried it once and it froze my computer causing days of problems. Thanks in advance.

When playing CMBB against AI the game seems to take forever between turns (Actaully about 60 - 90 seconds). This is especially true when there is lots of armor on the field. I suppose this is because of all the calculations required on armor strength, angles, missile attributes etc.. etc. etc.. What do the computer wizards out there think would help speed up this process. Faster CPU (What type), more RAM (How Much), powerfull graphics card (Which one), Best OS ?? Right now I have Windows 2000 (Which seems to me to be slower than my old Win98 !!). 512Mb Ram, and a NVidia 4200 G Force card by PNY.

My super GForce card smoked yesterday (Literally red-hot and smoking !!) so I am forced to go back to my old PCI Voodoo 3 card until PNY replaces my Ge Force (Which I hope they will if I can ever reach them). Now I get awfull display (Slow and poor quality) and bad sound, I tried a search on this forum but could not find a suitable answer. The Voodoo used to work fine on Win 98, but I am now on Win 2K, anyone know if I have to do anything special because of this ??

My advice - stick with CMBO, they really took the fun out of CMBB and replaced it with stodgy, slow hard work. I have played dozens of PBEM with CMBB and I still don't like it. Troops tire so easily that it takes half the turns just getting to the battlefield. Mortors and other light artillery make hardly a "Pop" and result in a small pin-prick in the dirt. If you don't scour the battlefield with a magnifying glass you won't even know that your wasting all those valuable shells on an open area. Enough bitching - they are both great games CMBO is just more fun (Wish they would either upgrade it with a newer engine or put the fun back into CMBB). Good luck with your choice - enjoy !!

Does anyone know how many mines are in an Anti-personnel minefield ?? I tried an experiment running troops up and down a minefield and counted 36 explosions before I got fed up watching those idiots follow my orders without question.

I think I found the problem - After an unbelievable number of re-installs with numerous combinations of parameters, I decided to move my one memory set from slot to the other and "Bingo". So far I have 10 out of 10 sucessfull re-boots. Question now is, is the memory stick bad or is there a problem with the MB ?? Once again thanks for your advise and support.

Hey Schrullenhaft - thanks for sticking with this problem especially over the holiday period, I feel that I am taking advantage of your precious time. It's comforting to hear you say that I should stick with this Win2K OS. I have plenty of people telling me to throw it away and get XP ?? Anyway - here is the latest: 1) In my ignorance I understood that the NFT?? file system would lead to problems when sharing files with others, so for now I will stick with the FAT32. 2) I had a low battery warning during one of the dozens of boot-ups, I replaced it with a new one, reset all the parameters and completely re-installed Win2000 onto a freshly partitioned C drive. The system will run but it takes anything from 0 - 5 "Soft" re-starts to get past this black screen hang-up. I found out that it makes no difference going into the BIOS and changing the settings as I once thought. I still saw the low battery warning once. When W2k does manage to run all my programs including CMBO and CMBB run just fine. I am now resigned to the fact that on boot-up my machine will hang up a random number of times. Mother board problem ??

Just a quick sanity check here: 1) Everything was working just fine with Win 98 SE. 2) No new hardware or programs other than Win2K 3) To get Win 2K installed was not straightforward - My C drive was 38 Gb, Win2k can't use a disk bigger than 20 Gb AND format to FAT32 file system. So under instruction from Microsoft Help desk I partitioned the C drive to 20gb for the Win2k. During this format the drive actually came up as 20.3 Gb, could the extra 0.3 Gb it accumulated somehow be a problem ??

The Win200 progress bar I mention is Black& White at the bottom of the screen 0 - 100% scale - IF I get to that everything is OK. The computer hangs just before this, so if I press F8 it will take me to a boot menu choice NOT the safe mode etc.. I can't get that far when the problem occurs. Vid card is a PNY g-Force4 Ti 4200. I have just been told by someone that I might have a hard drive problem and that I should try to boot up fom the CD with Win2K disk (Not install of course) ?? what do you think ?

Got a new LCD for Xmas (Samsung 152T) it's great, but I still have the same W2K boot problem. However CMBO and CMBB now work after I got Direct X 9.0 Yipee !! As to the other suggestions: a) Not blank at initial boot, I can see the memory count etc. Screen goes blank just before the "Starting Windows" progress strip along the lower section of the screen starts. I have version 3.1 K7S5A MB c) One DIMM chip card (256Mb) d) CMOS and MB should be compatable as they are original and never gave any trouble since I got them until this W2k upgrade. e) Power supply - should be OK only 6 months old and is a good quality one. f) On board sound and LAN. yes - it works fine. g) No cards in any PCI slot. A dumb question - but when I update BIOS I simply download from the ECS web site and unzip then run. Is that all there is to it - I don't get any indication that the BIOS has actually been updates - Am I doing this right, how can I tell ??