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Dell Inspiron 5160 with Volari XP5 graphics


Fifi

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A friend of mine bought a Dell Inspiron 5160 with a Volari XP5 graphics adapter. When we try and run CMBB, we get to the main fighting screen and can see the controls at the bottom. The 3D area his remnants of text and dialog boxes. The game seems to be working, just no graphics.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to make this work? (I sure wish he had the nVidia card ....) My friend badly wants to play this game, he finally bought a computer for home use specifically for this game.

Thanks!

Philip

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What Redwolf suggested would be the best alternative, although I don't know what the cost or downtime would be for such a swap/upgrade. You're friend can probably get more info at Dell's Support site.

Something else to try, though I have no idea how successful it may be, is to remove and reinstall the drivers.

I've seen a somewhat similar problem with the SiS display chips (and XGI is a spinoff of SiS). What you would have to do is to remove the current drivers with the Add/Remove Programs control panel. First you would need to download the latest XGI XP5 driver (Dell v. 2.097 (A06)). Then remove the driver with the Add/Remove Programs control panel. Once that is finished you'll need to reboot. Your video will be redetected and hopefully Windows won't have the driver info to reinstall it over again.

At this point you need to extract the files by launching the downloaded driver. Have it install to a directory that is empty and you can easily find later. Once the files are done extracting the program will automatically start installing. Cancel this. In the directory that you had the files extract to there will be a WinXP directory. In here will be the files you'll need to use to install the video driver.

Go to the Control Panel > System control panel > Hardware tab > Device Manager button. Double-click on the yellow question mark that mentions Video display, VGA, etc. Click on the Driver tab and then click on the Update/Install Driver button. Eventually you'll need to point it to the WinXP directory mentioned earlier and it should find the appropriate INF file there (T2200DL.INF). This should hopefully install the required drivers and after this you'll probably need to reboot.

Make sure that the desktop is running at or above the resolution you selected for CM earlier (from the Display control panel). After that go ahead and try CM and see if it works hopefully it will.

XGI is a spinoff of SiS's graphics division and it also includes the former Trident Microsystems graphics hardware IP and engineers. The latest Trident hardware/drivers didn't really work with CM (Cyberblades being one of the more common pieces of later Trident hardware). The SiS cores have had some driver problems, but as I've listed above there had been workarounds for them. I don't know if this is the case with the XGI hardware/drivers or not.

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Even though you have the latest drivers, I'd suggest reinstalling them in the method I've listed above. I've found that the SiS drivers would not work with CM unless only the driver itself was installed without using the setup program. For some reason the setup program did something to the drivers/registry (even if you deselected installing any of the driver's control panels within the setup program). There may be something similar happening with the XGI drivers. It's worth a try and beyond that I'd suspect that there may be nothing that can be done and it would have to be chalked up as a driver incompatibility.

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