Everything was fine w/ CMBB and then...

[grantao]

I purchased CMBB Special Edition in early December and played it successfully for two months or so on my 1.8 GhZ, WinXP with Nvidia card without any problems other than the corrupted text thing that you can Alt-Tab to solve.

I purchased another game -- Thief Gold, from 1999 or so -- installed it and played it for a while.

Yesterday I removed Thief and put in CMBB again, but for some reason I can't figure out the game is giving me that minimum resolution of 800 x 600 screen at the beginning and crashing out.

Now I'm wondering how I was able to play this without a problem two months ago but can't get it to work now. When installing Thief it was necessary to do a force setup because it wasn't made for XP, but I don't see how that may have affected my video drivers or CMBB. I downloaded the 52.76 Nvidia drivers, if that makes any sense, but it's not helping, even with anti-aliasing turned off.

Any advice?

Grant

[Schrullenhaft]

You need to be a bit more specific with your problem. Are you only being offered 800x600 ? At what point does CMBB 'crash out', before you can see any of the 2D splash screens or while playing the game, etc. ?

What exactly did you have to do to 'force' the install of Thief ?

What is your current desktop resolution and what 'monitor' do you have defined in the Device Manager ('default' ?) ?

[grantao]

Thanks Schrullenhaft...

"You need to be a bit more specific with your problem. Are you only being offered 800x600? At what point does CMBB 'crash out', before you can see any of the 2D splash screens or while playing the game, etc. ?"

I click on the desktop CMBB icon. I see the CDV logo and the Battlefront image and hear the sweeping audio but then it flashes to a black screen with...

"This game requires 800 x 600 minimum display"

After that, the game immediately crashes out to Windows.

"What exactly did you have to do to 'force' the install of Thief ?"

Thief Gold was made before Windows XP, I'm guessing. To force it to install, I followed the advice below, which I copied from a Thief tech support FAQ... (great game, btw.)

How do I install Thief on Windows 2000 or Windows XP?

Go to Start, then Run, then type d:\setup.exe -lgntforce, where d:\ is your CDrom/DVDrom drive. (note: that's -lgntforce, lowercase "L". If you're unsure, copy and paste it from here.) This problem arises because Win2K and WinXP are based on the NT kernel, which had DirectX support which was flaky at best. Thief needs DirectX to run, so, when the installer sees the NT kernel, it assumes that the game isn't going to be able to run and quits the installation. The -lgntforce switch tells the installer to ignore the NT kernel and install anyway.

"What is your current desktop resolution and what 'monitor' do you have defined in the Device Manager ('default' ?) ? "

Well I can change the resolution all I want. Right now it's at 1024 x 768, and the monitor is the one that came with the computer, and I haven't changed anything there at all. Again, I was successfully enjoying CMBB with only that corrupted text problem. I have a Nvidia GeForce2 MX/MX400 in my computer.

My guess is that something happened to the DirectX info when I installed Thief Gold, but I'm somewhat clueless about what to do next. Any idea on how to proceed?

Grant

[Schrullenhaft]

The DirectX version that comes with Windows XP is 8.1. That should be enough to run CMBB. However you've installed a newer video driver that will probably require DirectX 9.0b, which you can download here (this is the 'redistributable, which is almost 36Mb in size).

There are no "force" switches for installing any of the CM series titles. The Thief problem seems to be something unique to their installer (because it made the assumption that an 'NT Kernel' is just Windows NT 4.0 which didn't support anything above DirectX 3.0). Also, none of the CM series should be set for 'Windows Compatibility'. Such compatibility settings may even cause more problems if they're set (and they may get automatically set if you've upgraded an earlier version of Windows to XP).

The 'monitor definition' I was referring to is how Windows describes your monitor in the Device Manager. It may be a specific model, 'Plug and Play' or just 'Default'. Default (and sometimes Plug and Play) may not work very well for some DirectX games such as CM. It's best to try to get the most specific model driver for your monitor (if there's anything available). Otherwise 'Plug and Play' may be the best alternative.