Random Crashes and very dark

[conrad]

Just bought a Dell XPS and of course I wanted to get my versions of CMBB and CMAK on them. On my friends computer they are beautiful games. He is running an Athalon AMD and Linux system. So I thought that the following would be no problem

Dell XPS

P4 3Ghz

1 GB Ram

Windows XP Pro

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

Sound Blaster Audigy 2

DirectX 9.0b (from call of duty)

Old CRT monitor set at 85Hz

All out of the box.

I had major issues installing CMBB and CMAK. Managed to work around it (thanks for the info on McAfee and letting the DVD drive run for 10 min plus)

Now I am faced with a muddy/dirty/dark game that randomly freezes (I think after a wav file is accessed because it seems to occur right about when some ambient noise changes). When it freezes it really freezes there his no esc or Atl-Tab out of it. I can't even bring up the Alt-Tab-Del window. I am forced to do a hard reboot!

I am dying here, this really blows knowing that my friends old computer runs and plays these games beautifully and I am struggling along with my brand new machine which I bought with the idea that I would finally be able to see these programs in their glory. Any help or suggestions/advice/troubleshooting would be really appreciated.

Thanks

Conrad

[Schrullenhaft]

For a number of users the CM series may be a bit darker on the PC than many other games. You can use the Alt-G keystroke within the game to adjust the gamma. There are five settings (the default being in the middle of them). You can also use a program like PowerStrip that can have hotkeys assigned to commands to adjust the gamma. This will allow you to adjust the gamma while you're still in the game. All other utilities, including the driver control panels, will not adjust CM's gamma.

Which Catalyst version are you using ? Admittedly there isn't really a recommended version of the Catalysts. You may want to experiment around with the Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings in the Display control panel to see if this helps. Generally Antialiasing will cause problems with text in CM, so it is usually recommended to turn it off.

As for lockups associated with sound. You can turn off the ambient sound with the Shift-S hotkey. See if this makes a difference in your lockups. You may also want to 'unload/kill' any programs running in the background, including sound-related ones.

There are some new EAX 4.0 drivers for the Audigy 2 line at Creative's website that may be worth installing. However there may be other issues at work here that these drivers won't address (or possibly could make worse). You may want to check Dell's website for any particular issues or updates.

Another thing to try is to reduce the Audigy's audio processing. Go to the Start Menu > Run and type in "dxdiag" to run the DirectX Diagnostic. Go to the 'Sound' (or 'Sound1') tab and on the 'Hardware Sound Acceleration Level' slider, move it to the left one or more notches (this may require a restart at some point). This will force the CPU to play a bit more of a part in the processing of sound, but it may have the advantage of reducing some problems.