CMAK not recognising Display

[foamy]

I tried to run CMAK Demo on my machine at work (XP) to show a friend how good the game is and he should get it.

Well, it installed OK, but then came the part where CMAK needs to recognise the display being used, it could not. A little bit of research revealed that the diplay is a "Generic" Plug& Play LCD monitor by Planar systems. I called the manufacturer and was told that there is no driver available - it just uses Windows system ????

Does this sound like a reasonable explanation, can it be solved ??

[Schrullenhaft]

When you launched CMAK what happened ? Did you see any of the resolution selection dialog boxes ? Was the screen 'garbled' or just completely black ? If the screen was garbled or completely black how long did you wait before killing the game ?

As for monitor drivers - that's fairly common with a number of no-name generics. They're dependent on the Windows 'Plug and Play' monitor definition, which should usually work. Which videocard and driver does your friend have installed at work ?

[foamy]

The game loads and we get the screen to choose a resolution which has just one choice 680 X 440 ??. If I try to skip to another the program stops, If I choose this low setting, I can see that the screen has changed to this setting for a very short time, then all goes black, but music is playing.

The card is a Raedon somthing (don't know what right now but can find out), and the desktop is set to 1024 X ??? when running normal windows progs.

[Schrullenhaft]

640x480 is the lowest resolution that the CM series will offer; beyond that a DirectX error will be produced (a limitation of the DirectX routine used to select the resolution). The reasoning behind that is that you haven't selected a previously show resolution so it is assumed that nothing worked on your monitor/videocard.

However 640x480 doesn't work with CMBB & CMAK, which both require 800x600 as the minimum resolution.

What Windows version is this ? What version of the video driver and DirectX is installed ? Does any other version of CM run on this computer at the moment ? Generally a Radeon videocard should work with any of the CM series (the minimum amount of VRAM for this family of videocards is usually 32Mb).

Go to the Start Menu > Run > type in 'dxdiag' (without the quotes). Near the bottom of the 'System Information' section of the first tab it will tell you the version of DirectX. You'll want DirectX 8.1 or later, but it is most important to match your version of DirectX to what your video driver requires (most of the latest drivers need DirectX 9.0b.

On the 'Display' tab there should be three settings under DirectX Features: DirectDraw Acceleration, Direct3D Acceleration (most important for CM's purposes) and AGP Texture Acceleration (also important, if available). Preferably all three of these should be enabled (they are when a button for 'disable' is visible). Run the 'Test Direct3D' and see if the card passes. It may pass, but there could still be problems with 3D games.

What's usually involved with situations like this is reinstalling DirectX, uninstalling (completely) the current video driver - to the point the 'generic' Windows driver is installed, and then installing the appropriate video driver (newer or older). During this process you'll want to exit any programs or anti-virus utilities, etc.