Andrew Kulin

No. But I am presuming that the implementation for modifying print properties cannot have changed all that much between the 1000 and the 1200. And certainly the ability to print in black only should be available somewhere. Unless of course an HP programmer "forgot" to include this ability for the 1200. On the other hand, with the insane profit margins to be made on colour inkjet inks ... Some other thoughts (some painfully obvious so bear with me) - Anything about this in any of yoiur printer's documentation? (paper or electronic) - Does your printer come with a utility program (mine is found under the Properties/Services tab). Maybe they hid the Black Only feature there??? - Check HP website for FAQs and the like regarding your printer. - Call HP Technical Support and ask - Buy CMBB which comes with a printed manual that is more or less identical to CMAKs as far as I can tell (with perhaps a few pages here and there devoted to differences in theatres, dust clouds, multi-turretted tanks, etc.). Could be cheaper than cost of ink/paper to print out the CMAK manual

I have an HP 1000. Select "Properties" and select the "Advanced" tab. At the top their is a check box for Grey Scale. It defaults to High Quality so make sure you select "Black Only", otherwise the printer will use the coloured inks as well to give you a black and white image thus defeating your purpose.

You washed and dried the CD???? Sounds like that "might" be one thing that could be ailing you if you actually did so. How does the disc look? Any scratches? I hope when you washed and dried the disc you did so by going from center to the outside edge (radial motion). Never rub a CD/DVD in a circular motion because if you get scratches they will be along the tracks of data and you can defeat any error checking redundancies built into the disc and get a crash. One final thing about scratches on a CD/DVD is that occasional light scratches should not be a problem because the laser is unfocused when it hits the plastic surface (it comes to focus inside the plastic on the aluminized data layer) so these types of scratches should not affect its ability to read the data (if you wear glasses and have slight scuffs on them you'll know exactly what I mean). Another thing to consider is the age of your drive (hours used). The lasers used have a certain lifetime and as they start to go you will experience read problems on certain discs even if these discs are fully in specification with the optical disc standards. Also take Schullencraft's advice and update your drive's firmware/drivers. Finally see if you can try and load it on some other machines, preferably XP. I have never had any issues with loading the games on my XP machines so my feeling is that it is something more to do with your hardware or disc. Good Luck

If I understood you, the blac screen only appears when you use your desktop shortcut and the choice as it appears in your start menu. Right click on both your shortcut and the choice on the Start Menu and Select the properties for each of these two shortcuts. Check the path where the shortcut is looking for the executable file (you may have to search for it on one of the the 3 or 4 tabs that are available). Compare that to the path you get using "My Computer" for which you are basically starting the executable w/o a shortcut. Do they match? If not then edit them to match the path that is uded by "My Computer" and try that to see if it now works.

Contact Michael Dorosh (maybe check CMMODS first to see if he put it there). He's got an elevation mod (based on squad leader elevation colors I think) that better highlights elevations. It's god-awful ugly and tough on the eyes but it allows you to quickly identify terrain features (like highest ground, sheltered avenues of approach, etc.). I use it sometimes when setting up for a battle but switch back to normal terrain coloring to play out the battle. If you want to see what it looks like go back in the Tips and Tricks forum and search for a thread on SMG tactics (late fall of 2003 if I recall). He went through a battle step-by-step with someone (Jasoc C or Walpurgis Night?) and he posted screen shots and a link to his AAR site which used his elevation mod (and elicited quite a few comments regarding its beauty from the crowd too!)

I had a Dell PII/400 bought in 1998 so things may have changed since then (I think Dell and other brand-name mfg's are using less proprietary stuff but I could be mistaken). On my old Dell the motherboard, power supply and case were proprietary to Dell (connectors from power supply to motherboard and from case to motherboard (LEDs, on-off/reset switches, etc.) were different than standard as I found out at a later date. Also, if I recall it was not too easy to get into BIOS but it could be done. This was a decision made by Dell to prevent people from getting in and buggering up the settings and thus use technical support more often than necessary. Nonetheless my Dell machine was well built and fast and stood me in good stead for 4 1/2 years until the power supply started to go. Only thing was that it was considered underpowered even in 1998 (200W - 250W would have been better) so that may be a consideration for you if you plan on adding lots of upgrades down the road (e.g., additional drives, high powered video cards, etc.) As far as other accessories (Video Card, hard-drives, ROMs, etc.) they were not proprietary and you could replace them with newer units or add extras. Just be cognizant about the units power supply rating because it might not have enough head room to allow tons of new peripherals to be added. Ask Dell up-front what teh power rating is on the unit. Good Luck

Presuming that your old drive is being installed just because you can - for backups or overflow or whatever - then set your Operating System Drive as a Master on one channel and the ROM device that you will use most (if you have more than one to choose from) as a Master on the second channel. Then set secondary drives (i.e., less used) as slaves on either channel.

From my own horrible PC experiences here are some things to check: - Power supply is often most overlooked culprit. It could be underpowered or showing major voltage fluctuations. You do not say but is your power supply a quality brand name (Antec, Enermax, Power PC and Cooling, etc.) or a no-name generic brand?. Try monitoring your voltages outside of BIOS - I use a program called Motherboard Monitor but there are others out there as well. I believe the rule of thumb you want is within +/- 5% of the stated voltage. - check capacitors on mobo and all cards and look for signs of failure (leakage and/or the tops are bulging out. In my experience this caused odd crashes that increased in frequency over time and eventually led to inability to boot up at all. (Capacitors are the things that look like miniature pop cans BTW). - get the hard-drive diagnostic software from your vendor to do a check (you may have to boot in DOS depending on the vendor). I had a Fu****su drive (two actually when you count the replacement) that caused all kinds of grief over time that got worse as the drive slowly failed. Some IBM drives are also prone to higher than normal fail rates as well. - if overclocking turn it back down - Are all case fans working and blowing air the right way into/out of the case. Is inside of case neat and tidy (wires tied up) or is it a messy tangle that impedes efficient airflow? Have you set up your hardware so that there is as much open airspace around them as you can manage (e.g., try to leave empty bays between hard-drives as these run hot). Have you tried running game with side cover off the case (to expose allparts to room temperature air and does it still crash when playing the game? The program Motherboard Monitor also monitors CPU, motherboard and case temperature if your CPU/board support it

Check out the links in the second post under the topic "Processes to Kill" (currently on Page 2 of this message forum). I have used the information from the BlackViper link (1st link provided in the second message) to remove unwanted processes in my XP OS w/o problems. I think that will help answer your second question.

I'd love a decent to find a decent PC game covering WWI. A CM mod would fit the bill nicely. Think of all the cheap artillery you'd get to buy! But you'd have to really up the Tac-AI to account for the fact that once the battle started communicating back and forth between the advancing troops and the rear HQs became next to impossible as well as making changes to the complex artillery firing plans (creeping barrages for example). So I guess what I am saying is you'd need to have one 30 to 60 minute planning stage and then watch the movie to see what happens.

Are you playing a game with massive amounts of damage/craters? This tends to make video cards crawl. Or all scenarios? You also do not say what video card you are using and your system specs which may help with ideas. Some thoughts for you in the meantime: - Did you just drop a more powerful CPU on an existing mobo or were there other hardware changes? - BIOS set-up correctly for the new CPU after the upgrade? - All drivers up-to-date? - What backgrund processes are running? - Anything else you installed recently that might be causing the problem (hardware or software) - Any changes to CMAK, eg. did you increase screen resolution? Consider deleting the prefs file in the main CMAK directory and rechoosing whatever screen resolution/refresh rate (I personally aim for a 72 Hz refresh rate - high enough for me to eliminate flicker but not wasting CPU/Video resources redrawing the screen e.g., 100X/second (100 Hz))

You don't say anything else about your system specs but I'd guess it would be pretty high end given your card. In my opinion I don't think you need to upgrade your card to a 256 MB version for CM if that is all you are interested in. They say the 256 MB will be good for games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 when they come out if that's your thing. I have the MSI FX5900XT-VTD128 which is a slower clocked version of your card and I run the game with 8X AA and AF with no slowdowns (P4-2.8C/865PE) so again I'd say not really worth the upgrade. Also, FYI there are reviews now (tomshardware.com, Maximum PC magazine) on the new NVidia FX6800 and it looks like a revolutionary (opposed to evolutionary) step forward (plus ATI has the R420 coming out soon too). So if anything, once these uber-cards hit the street you'll either be wanting one of those, or the 256MB versions of the 5900 will drop in price.

I also found that if you click on and continue to hold down the movement arrow buttons (N,E,S,W) you get a bit of an increase in your scroll rate. Good for scrolling long distances across the map.

Well it's not that steep a slope. It looks just like your typical country stream. A drop of 40 m over 5 km (5000 m) lenght (with meanders) is not all that steep (0.8%). And it is more or less in a fairly wide flood plain so steep banks is not an issue except around major bends. If I can't find a workaround that looks somewhat reasonable (like Marsh which doesn't work) then I'll probably go rough terrain to make crossing difficult. I just wish water was modelled as it was in CMBO.

I am designing a map for CMBB based on an actual location with a good contour map (4 x 4 km size). On this map there are two streams that are located in two deep valleys. Over the course of their 4 km runs they drop maybe 50-60 metres in elevation. I know CMBB (and CMAK) does not let water levels change on continuous paths of water (it will set the entire watercourse at the lowest level on the river's water tiles). What tricks can I employ to mimic a drop in water level w/o ending up with land bridges separating changes in water elevation over the length of these streams? I've tried marsh tiles and that doesn't work so any ideas and workarounds would be appreciated. I don't want to end up with river tiles in a gorge at the north end of my map because this is not the way the locationis in reality. Andrew

I am running an MSI FX5900XT-128 VTD (AGP) with no problems. Have had it for a 2 to 3 months and at that time you could find it for down to maybe US$180-$190 on-line. Could be less expensive now though.

I find scrolling in the map editor takes 2 seconds either direction and for any map size. It's not instantaneous but it's not too troubling. How much RAM do you have? What processes running in background? System Specs: P4C-2.8 GHz/800 MHz ASUS P4P800 Deluxe (BIOS 1.0.15) 1 GB DDR RAM (800 Mhz) MSI FX5900XT-128VTD Video Card - 56.64 Drivers/8XAA, 8XAF SB Audigy Gamer 2 X WD 120 GB (8 MB Cache) - ATA RAID 0 1 X WD 120 GB (8 MB Cache) - ATA Samsung SD332 DVD/CD-RW combo Drive 19 " Dell Monitor XP Home (up-to-date)

Also keep in mind that you can get a reduced rate on the cost of XP should you purchase it with the motherboard. I just built a new system in February and I picked up XP Home (OEM) from the store I bought my motherboard from for $134 CDN. The same software (non-upgrade version-retail) would go for approx. $300 CDN. So there is a savings if you buy it at the same time as the motherboard (but I understand you must buy it when you buy the motherboard). Also I'd go with XP - I found it a LOT less prone to crashes/BSOD than Win 98. (though if you have lots of "older" software you like to use you may find some are problematic with XP even when using compatibility modes - in particular (from my experience in my household) with any young kids educational software (for 2-6 yr olds so far) which seem to me to be less stringently coded (ex. some have the ability to install DX 5.0 over DX 9.0 - that's always fun so don't let the wife or kids install these games :mad: )) [ April 15, 2004, 12:11 AM: Message edited by: Andrew Kulin ]

Maybe if you think of it like this it may help make sense. There is a reduction in visibility as night falls (and an increase as it ends) such that it becomes more and more difficult to make out men and vehicles on the ground than it would during full daylight hours where you could see things many hundreds of metres away. So visibility of units is restricted during these times. But I find that the sky stays brighter than the ground at these times so it would stand to reason that any dust clouds (which rise up into the sky) will be visible from distances greater than that of the visibility of units on the ground. How does that now grab you as a game feature? Andrew

What about assanguine?

What exactly varies from 30 seconds to full 60 seconds? That is not clear. What version of CMBO was the save game file made with? I understand that there could be problems running saved files from an older version on new versions of CM games. Also, your mobo has onboard graphics, correct? As you have an add-in video card, did you disable the onboard graphics in your BIOS?

That sounds like a good system. I guess the thing that bothers me most of all with QB generated maps is that even with good ones, they still do not look real to me (and by real I mean they do not look like realistic geographic loacations with topographic features that make sense, roads and villages that would be sited realistically, etc.). And don't even get me started on how the QB generator generates Large Town maps! AWFUL! Have you considered downloading some of the map only designs from the mod and scenario sites or even creating your own for a PBEM match? I'd think you could even just import some of the CD scenario maps w/o units and use those for your QBs and set unit parameters and dates to your liking. At least then the maps you'd be workling on would likely be more realistic than the random QB maps.

Sorry John - had to break your string of consecutive posts at six

Sorry John - had to break your string of consecutive posts at six

Sorry John - had to break your string of consecutive posts at six