Still no joy............going slowly insane.......

[Guest Molyneaux]

Still cant get the demo to work right, freezes my comp every time. Got all the newest drivers for my vid,sound and mouse, DX7a. Runnin out of ideas and hope

P2 450, Diamond ViperII ultra, SBPCI64,Microsoft Explorer mouse,128 meg ram.

Help!!

[Guest KwazyDog]

Molyneaux, apologies is you posted this before but I think it would be good to post the actually point of lock up, and the type of lock up it is... Does it require a reboot after the lock up? Do you even get to the intro screen.

Oh, and one last thing to try would be to delete the preferences file in the Combat Mission Directory and reselect the video option, just in case there was a problem there. Hopefully we should be able to work it would Molyneaux, I have excatly the same setup as you (minus the explorer mouse) and I have it up and running...

[Guest gyrene251]

Try putting the Gold Demo in a separate directory instead of overwriting the beta demo (if you did this). It may be that your prefs from the beta demo are incompatible with the Gold Demo...

[Mike D]

The above suggestions are good ones.

If you tried installing the Gold Demo in the old Beta demo directory, that was probably a bad idea.

Try reinstalling the whole thing into a clean directory.

Also, to all of you out there that are having problems. In the past on other games when I've had problems similar to many of those being described here on the board the following has sometimes helped:

1) Redownload the demo (I know, argggggggghhhhhh!). Sometimes stuff somehow gets corrupted during a download. It might not be too often, but it does happen. I know this for a fact because I can remember at least one specfic case where I redownloaded and installed an application and most / all of the problems went away.

2) I know everyone loves having all kinds of other app's running, multitasking, etc. DON'T DO THIS. Turn all of that other "crap" off. You are taking up resources and memory having all of this garbage running. Try playing the game from a clean boot-up w/ everything else that you normally have running like Netscape/IE, etc., OFF!

3) Video cards can cause all kinds of problems. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your card and a "current" version of DirectX. I know you've already done this, but you'd be surprised how many people have never updated their drivers. Also, if you happen to notice problems w/ a growing number of newer applications, and you go to download new video drivers from your cards manufacturer and see that the "latest" one they have is 2-3 years old, it might be time to get a new video card. After a while they just stop supporting older cards and as a result the card starts to have more and more problems w/ newer applications. Diamond Viper II Ultra shouldn't be causing these kinds of problems though. If you have the clock speed turned way up (I think it's adjustable on the ultra) you might want to crank things back to the lower/default settings and see what happens. Also, I thought Nvidia had some default drivers on their website. You might want to try downloading these and using them instead of the Diamond drivers. I've had some problems using Diamonds drivers before w/ all the extra bells and whistles add on stuff they have. So going to the Nvidia drivers and/or reloading the Diamond one's without all the extra Diamond crap, might possibly help as well.

4) For those of you w/ vidoe card more than 2 years old. If you can, find someone that has a newer video card that you can borrow and try out. You might find that your video card is getting a little older and it's time to replace it and trying out a newer one is a good way to see if this is the case (again, I know a TNT2 card shouldn't be having these kinds of problems).

WARNING: I HESITATE TELLING ANYONE TO TRY NUMBER 5, BUT IT HAS HELPED ME FIX CERTAIN THINGS IN THE PAST.

5) On one rare occasion in particular I had to take very drastic action to fix a problem. LET ME STATE FOR THE RECORD: DON'T DO THIS UNLESS ALL ELSE FAILS. I was having problems playing Close Combat III. Very, very, weird things started happening after I'd already been playing the game for a good couple of months (all sorts of lock ups and the like). After a week or two of not playing the game, I started to notice other strange happenings in other applications. I finally decided to reformat my entire hard drive and reinstall Windows. After doing this, all of the problems "magically" disappeared.

If you are going to do this make sure you back up all of your important data to tape/disk somewhere as you will lose all of it when you reformat your hard drive. Alternatively, you can try to just reinstall window's, but I don't believe this is as "clean" of a fix as doing it the other way. Anyways, like I said, only do this if you are seeing other problems and/or are just plain totally desperate. And make absolutely certain you've exhausted all of your possible video card fixes, etc., too.

Mikester out.

[Guest Molyneaux]

Thanks for the replies guys. I have already done mmost of that except reformatting, I do that about every 4 months anyway The lockup usually occurs after I get into the game, but is not consistent from there, I have managed to get as far as four turns, but sometimes it locks during set up, sometimes after. Always seems to lock while I am moving around the map or issuing orders, but happens whether I am moving with the mouse or using the keypad.

I have tried both the Diamond and Nvidia drivers, I always have all TSR's turned off, I play alot of games that are system hogs and got into the habit of turning everything that wasnt absolutely necessary off. I deleted the beta demo before I installed the new one, have installed it twice now, will try to re D/L it and install one more time. Hope that works cause nothing else is so far.

Will let ya know.........its driving me crazy lol.

Molyneaux out....

[Craig]

Have you tried CTRL ALT DEL after a fresh boot? This brings up the close program dialog box, and as far as I know you only need systray and explorer running. This speeds things up and eliminates any conflicts that might occur.

Craig (sitting in the middle of a freak snowstorm)

[Guest Ol' Blood & Guts]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Molyneaux:

Still cant get the demo to work right, freezes my comp every time. Got all the newest drivers for my vid,sound and mouse, DX7a. Runnin out of ideas and hope

P2 450, Diamond ViperII ultra, SBPCI64,Microsoft Explorer mouse,128 meg ram.

Help!!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

That's the same setup as mine almost to a tee, except I have Celeron 433 with a Microsoft Intellimouse. I had no problems. Are you using the latest drivers for your Viper 770? I happily run it in 1024x768.

[Guest Ol' Blood & Guts]

There is another way around reformatting and all that.

It maybe that one or more Windows system files may be corrupted, deleted, or changed.

Go into your Accessories, the System Tools, System Info, and then click on Tools in the menu and go to System File Checker. From there the computer will check for the fore-mentioned problems and it will let you re-install the problem files from the Windows CD without having to do the reformat thing.

Also if you have your video card overclocked, that may be the problem. Turn it back down to 1x. Some games won't run at all when the card is overclocked.

One more thing if you have recently installed a new version of DirectX, then go back and re-install both your video card and sound card drivers. DirectX will overwrite some of your particular cards drivers. So going back and re-installing the card drivers usually fixes any stability problems.

What I do, is to have the Viper card driver file on my Desktop and and whenever I re-install DirectX for any reason, I just double-click on it and re-install it from there. Very handy.

[This message has been edited by Ol' Blood & Guts (edited 05-11-2000).]

[Guest Molyneaux]

just to let ya know, i finally got the thing to run, had to turn off the "intellipoint" software for my explorer mouse and everything was good to go.

now to go and actually play the demo

Molyneaux out