Greg Scurlock Posted July 31, 2000 Share Posted July 31, 2000 In the technical help section of this board I see lots of complaints about crashes and lock ups. When I look at the computer specs they discribe, I see no common thread. Different systems and vidio cards all seem to have had problems of some sort. The game runs great on my system except for two minor complaints. The combat resolution period slows to between 30 and 45 seconds for the larger operations and scenarios like All or Nothing and Parkers Crossroads. These are discribed as huge. The second complaint is that I can't see the fog effect which is caused I assume by my somewhat underpowered Video card at 16 megs. I want to upgrade to a TNT2 V3800 32 meg card but would hate to do that and then start having problems running the game. I have an AMD K7 650 Mhz with 128 MEGs SDRAM. What do you think? Should I do it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark IV Posted July 31, 2000 Share Posted July 31, 2000 Upgrade your current card drivers first (it pays to check). I'm still using the P2-300, 128Mb RAM, with the Voodoo 3-3000, which is a 16Mb card, and the smoke is fine and no crashes or lockups (though there are very infrequent clashes with Outlook Express). I did need to upgrade to the latest driver set. Those that came with the card had the "blocky" smoke effect. I would sure investigate this before spending the buck$$ for a new video card. Cambes is pretty big and I have seen it stutter when there is a lot of smoke and action, but nothing serious. I occasionally see combat resolutions over a minute but that is quite rare. The longest wait seems to be "Starting 3D graphics..." when opening a fresh PBEM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kingfish Posted July 31, 2000 Share Posted July 31, 2000 Greg, What video card do you have? My first card was a dinky 4 meg and it showed fog. This may sound like a stupid question, but do you have weather effects turned off? ------------------ The dead know only one thing - it is better to be alive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Scurlock Posted August 1, 2000 Author Share Posted August 1, 2000 Yes Kingfish, I do have weather effects on. How do I find where the latest drivers can be downloaded from? I have a Diamond Stealth III card. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Major Tom Posted August 1, 2000 Share Posted August 1, 2000 I am waiting for the end of summer (after the start of the school year, after the time that people buy back to school computers) to upgrade my Pentium 266 64MB RAM to a Pentium 500 128MB RAM, along with a Vodoo 3 Card. I have noticed that my 266 with the 64MB goes VERY slow on the large maps, hopefully my new 500 will be a little smoother Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanco Posted August 1, 2000 Share Posted August 1, 2000 hi Greg, I did a search with Yahoo and it kicked out : http://www.s3.com/ try there first. DeanCo-- ohhh...hey....I'm a member!! [This message has been edited by deanco (edited 07-31-2000).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IDF Posted August 1, 2000 Share Posted August 1, 2000 Greg, You need to goto www.winfiles.com to upgrade the latest drivers. I'm pretty sure this is the right address, Its called Win files. They have all upgrades there. Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted August 1, 2000 Share Posted August 1, 2000 Greg - you can download drivers for the Diamond Stealth III S540 from here (make sure you select the Win9x drivers): http://www.s3.com/default.asp?menu=support&sub_menu=Graphics&item=drivers&pr oduct=Stealth_III_S540 Here are some slightly newer drivers from Reactorcritical.com (get the Win9x driver under Savage 4): http://www.reactorcritical.com/download.shtml The Savage 4 chipset is supposed to be able to support table-based fog, but apparently the drivers don't seem to be written well enough to actually support that feature. As for upgrading. For more speed in crunching the turn resolution a faster CPU would probably be the best bet (though the speed increase here may still be marginal). If you're interested in pursuing this you need to find out how fast of a CPU your motherboard can support (I'm guessing right now that it will not support the Socket A Athlon Thunderbirds). This can be a bit expensive, but the Slot A Athlons are coming down a bit in price (though the 1Ghz chips will probably remain fairly expensive until the Socket A's catch up in speed) since the Socket A's will be taking over the market. As for a video card your selection should be fine. If you could afford a GeForce DDR or 2, that would be even better. I'm not sure what other games you are playing, so a different video card may affect what you're seeing in those games too. NVidia usually does a fairly good job with their drivers (and ASUS usually has fairly good control panels). [This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 08-01-2000).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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