CM on a Laptop anyone?

[guys]

Borrowed the CM demo to run on my laptop.

Runs, albiet fairly slowly, however, the mouse cursor winks in and out and all the colours on screen are hues of green and purple! When I press escape to go back to the desktop, the colours go normal for a split second...

Tried the full games with the same result.

Ok i using a Dell pII 300/64mb Ram/

Video is 800x600 in 64K Colors, NeoMagic MagicMedia 256AV Ver. 4.11.01.5207-Q2.07.04

Any ideas? Is this a problem with using Direct x7?

Please, is it a dream getting CM to run on a laptop!

[Schrullenhaft]

Getting CM to run on a PC laptop is going to be hard. Almost all laptops have little or no 3D capability in their video chips. Next most laptops don't have a lot of video memory which slows things down due to textures, etc.

Unfortunately the only place to get a NeoMagic driver for your video card is from Dell. Depending on how old your laptop is there may be no further updates to the driver (maybe for "Windows ME").

What color depth are you running on the laptop ? I'd suggest trying 16-bit and higher. Possibly a different color depth may help. Also close down any applications you have running in the background just in case they are affecting your palette (which usually only happens at 256 colors).

If you can provide more details on your laptop (model#, etc.), there might be some more info for you. But... running CM on a laptop is usually going to be slow, if you can get around the video problems.

[KMHPaladin]

Actually... getting CM to run on a laptop isn't inconceivable. The chief problem is, as Schrullenhaft said, the lack of 3D capability. Unfortunately, your machine seems to lack the general processing power needed to run the game. I would highly recommend using "End It All," an application that will close down all unnecessary background programs. That will free up quite a bit of memory.

If you're in the market for a new laptop, however, the picture is much rosier. Many new laptops are shipping with a graphics card produced by ATi called the Rage Mobility Pro. Almost every computer that has a DVD drive will feature this chipset (check out the spec sheets at Dell, Gateway, IBM, etc - look at bottom). While it won't offer the performance of a GeForce card, it will offer more than sufficient performance for gaming (see the links below for a review.) Most companies ship with either a 4MB or 8MB version, but I've seen IBM A20-model machines that feature a 16MB version. That will, however, cost you - I have ordered an A20p and it is currently not scheduled to be in-stock until the 1st of September, and it costs just over $4000. However, that is just about top-of-the-line (PIII750,192MB,20Gig,6xDVD,16MB VRAM, 15") so you would probably be able to get something at a more reasonable cost if you're willing to sacrifice performance.

I have heard from a friend who talked to Dell and has fooled around inside his Inspiron 7500 that the graphics card can indeed be pulled out and apparently is upgradeable to a 16MB version (if not now then at a later date in the near future). Therefore, I wouldn't buy a Thinkpad solely because of the doubled Video memory. What type of laptop to buy is a whole other story...

The bottom line is that CM and other hardware-intensive games can be run on a laptop, but you need to have a decent laptop. Unfortunately, even if your computer was a desktop with a decent graphics card it wouldn't have stellar performance. BTW, BTS addresses the cursor issue in one of the readme's - you're probably using a custom cursor, which they say causes such a problem. Go back to the defaults and you should be okay.

Whew! I empathize with you, I am attending a college (Rensselaer Polytechnic) next year that requires laptops and I was very worried that I would have to leave all of my games behind. After some very frenzied research, I realized that was not the case . However, unless you have a newer laptop you probably won't get much more performance out of your current machine. If you want a quick-fix, try upgrading memory, that might help a little. Keep in mind that you can't upgrade your video card, they're soldered onto the motherboard.

Hope this helps, good luck! If you have any questions, email me (address below) and I'll see if I can help out.

Review of ATi Rage Mobility -

http://www.3dhardware.net/reviews/rage_mobility_128/

ATi's website - machines that ship with Rage Mobility -

http://www.ati.com/na/pages/onboard/onboard.html

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KMHPaladin

KHarkins@voicenet.com

"We have the enemy surrounded. We are dug in and

have overwhelming numbers. But enemy airpower is

mauling us badly. We will have to withdraw."

-- Japanese infantry commander, SITREP, Burma

[Melloj]

I have an Dell Inspiron 7500

600 mhz chip

256 ram

the 3d rage mobility chip

and 13 gig Hard drive.

Game runs fine in windows 98.

However I also have a 750 mhz desktop, that has dual boot between Win2k, and win 98

I find that the problem you are describing is common in windows 2000....if that is what you are using, the you are SOL. In windows 9X based os'es it should run fine if you have the hardware...

[guys]

Thanks for the advice!

Look, I've pretty much resigned myself that it's going to be a slow experience playing CM, but it's worth it

I've fixed the palette problem, by reducing the palette to 256 colours :-( it works...

I'm gonna contact dell and see if I can get a rage mobilty chip for an dell latitude CPi a series...

Dream on....

[Guest Steve Makarow]

Melloj, you and I have similar systems, but I'm getting lots of lockups.

My system:

Gateway Solo 9300

PIII-650

ATI Rage Mobility-P 8 MB

128 RAM

12 Gig HD

ESS Maestro 2E sound card

MS WheelMouse

Are you playing CM on your Inspiron 7500 with NO LOCKUPS?

I reformatted my HD about a month ago and loaded all the latest official drivers for my hardware and updates for Win98SE. As far as I can tell, my system is clean as a pin and all my other software and games are running fine.

As your system is close to mine, I'd really like to get some feedback from you.

Thanks.

[Melloj]

Steve,

Yes so far I haven't had one lock-up so far.

I do notice some differences between playing the game on my laptop vs. the desktop.

I played one scenario where there was lots of fog. In the laptop is hardly showed. Actually i didnt even realize the scenerio was supposed to have fog, until i played it on the desktop.

AS for my laptop. I am running win98SE, havent formatted it once since i got it, and i havent updated any drivers on it.

Im not too familiar with laptops, since i just got this one recently so i dont know what else could be the cause of your problems.

All the fixes that I know of which might work for a desktop system, dont have any validity in a laptop.

[Guest Steve Makarow]

Thanks for the reply, Melloj.

If you're not getting any lockups, then that makes me more hopeful for getting CM running smoothly on my laptop. I just bought it four months ago ($4,000 and top of the line for Gateway when I bought it) and it's my first laptop. I sold my desktop to help cover the cost, so I don't have an alternative system to run CM on.

What sound card do you have? I've got an ESS Maestro 2E. I'm thinking that that might be the culprit, rather than the graphics card.

Thanks,

Steve

[Claymore]

My setup (works sort of)

Gateway Solo2150

w/ Celeron 433

w/ 90MB

w/ ATI Mobility (4MB) (only 800x600 graphix)

Now the fun stuff:

In 640x400 CM runs flawlessly but I refuse to deal with such awful resolution.

In 800x600 CM exhibits a winking cursor. If I move the mouse it appears, if I stop then it the mouse disappears. If I ESC to the desktop the mouse will never reappear unless I quit the game and restart. This is probably caused by the Semantics Touchpad Software but upgrading the drivers have not helped. Upgrading the ATI drivers (from Gateway only) also did not help. The difficulties however are not sufficient to make me drop to the lower resolution.

My box at home has a Viper550 that exhibits no problems at all.

------------------

he which maketh the first assault doth endanger himselfe most (sometimes)

[kunzler]

My symptoms are similar to Claymore's. I have a Dell Inspiron 3700 PIII 450 laptop W/ an ESS Maestro sound card and a Rage Mobility M1 AGP 2x video card with 8Megs of memory. I run from a docking station with a Dell P90 19" monitor. I get the blinking cursor on high resolutions sometimes, but I (now) always crash on anything but 640x480 SW mode.

The ironic thing is that it just started crashing! I reset my desktop to 16 bit color mode recently to see if it would speed me up and I started crashing. I have tried switching back, but still crash. I crash at all settings but SW mode which is all but unplayable.

One strange symptom also now occurs on the select resolution screen. My cursor doesn't show up on the higher resolution screens and when the cursor does show up, I lose the left half of the white text box! This didn't happen before when I was not crashing (although I did experience cursor problems on the demo with an oversized cursor which I changed). I don't know what I have done. I have been trying all the sugggestions listed here, but so far, to no avail.

I do have a Logitech mouseman wheel mouse for which I have updated the drivers. I am going to try going back to the MS driver and also disabling my sound card. I can't think of anything else I can do.

Why is it that it worked before and doesn't now when all I have done is change color and resolution settings back and forth? I don't believe I have made anymore changes to my system. Schrullenhaft any ideas?

[Schrullenhaft]

Kunzler - That's definitely strange response from just changing your color depth. Does your internal/LCD display disable when you're plugged into an external monitor (being in a docking station probably prevents you from even looking at the LCD) ? I'd assume so, but I'm not absolutely sure with some systems. Driving both displays at the same time may cause some weirdness as more memory on the display adapter may be used to work with the different displays, etc. I suggest checking your CMOS/BIOS setup to see if there is any setting you could change to drive only one display at a time.

Here are the latest drivers from Dell (the ATI Rage Mobility drivers are only available from the laptop manufacturer):

A BIOS update doesn't exactly sound like it would do much, but it may be worth a try. The latest rev. is A08.

Dell Inspirion 3700 BIOS update (A08):

http://support.dell.com/us/en/filelib/system.asp?sid=INS_PNT_CEL_3700&m=l&p=1

The latest video driver, which you may already have.

ATI Rage Mobility (12-10-99):

http://support.dell.com/us/en/filelib/system.asp?sid=INS_PNT_CEL_3700&m=l&p=6

The latest audio driver that has been posted. This shouldn't be a factor in your current problem though.

Audio Driver:

http://support.dell.com/us/en/filelib/system.asp?sid=INS_PNT_CEL_3700&m=l&p=3

Do you still have the touchpad driver installed ? You may want to attempt to uninstall it or update it (probably uninstalling may be the best bet):

Touchpad driver:

http://support.dell.com/us/en/filelib/system.asp?sid=INS_PNT_CEL_3700&m=l&p=17

[Olle Petersson]

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

I would highly recommend using "End It All," an application that will close down all unnecessary background programs.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I've read about this program, but can't recall where to find it. I'd need it as well since my computer is way below what all other seem to be running, especially when it comes to graphics :-(

Updating the hardware is not an option since it's a rental computer that I'll be stuck with for another year...

Cheers

Olle

[guys]

Olle - I found End it all here:

http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/swlib/hotfiles/info.html?fcode=0011NB&b=

However, on my rather pathetic system as described above, it makes little difference.

(I have a Dell Latitude CPi A series/pII300/64mb/+slow video card)

Also, playing is frustrating due to the fact the mouse cursor only appears once every ten seconds or so... (I'll try uninstalling the touchpad driver...). I'm using a MS wheel mouse hmmm....

As for fog? Whats that?

[DigDug]

Hopefully, CM will run on my new notebook that's on order, scheduled for delivery in 3 weeks.

It's a HP Omnibook 6000, with a P3 750, 128MB RAM, ATI 8MB card, 6X DVD, 15" screen.

I will post here as soon as I get the notebook and play-test CM on it. I'm thinking it's gonna work great, but we'll see...

BTW...do major airlines let folks use laptops inflight? It's just takeoff and landing that you have to shut them off, correct?

[Neutral Party]

Sometimes when I'm out of town I play CM on my laptop. It's a Compaq Presario 180XL with 600MHz PIII, 8MB ATI Rage mobility graphics and a 15" screen.

The game plays well but without high quality smoke, fog or transparency effects. This seems to be a universal finding with ATI graphics (although I don't know about the new Radeon).

One weird thing is setting the graphics preferences from a 1024x768 desktop does not allow me to choose 1024 x 768 resolution for CM. I can see the splash screen with the 1024 x 768 option but the mouse/pointing device is inoperative so I can't click OK. When the resolution option drops to 800 x 600, the mouse becomes operational again and I can click OK.

Joe

[kunzler]

Neutral Party: Mine does that, but when it gets to the lower resolution and the cursor shows up, half the dialog box disappears also! To solve the resolution problem, I just set the desktop to a higher resolution than I want to play at, set the game resolution and then go back to the desktop resolution I want.

Schrullenhaft, I updated the bios to A08 just after the problems started. I am sure I have the new video driver, as I bought the comp in January, after the new version was posted.

I have also started losing the cursor when the game starts and have had to go back to the old trick used during the demo of starting up at 1100x768 then minimizing the game and switching the desktop to 800x600. Doing this, and disabling the sound card, and switching to the microsoft mouse, together with disabling all game features (e.g., weather, invisible houses, fog, etc.)and running as a laptop without the monitor now makes the game playable.

One clue I saw in another thread is heat. When I have had to reboot the machine after a crash, I have noticed that the bottom of the laptop has been very hot. I tried keeping it cool last night and didn't have any crashes. I also did all the other things I mentioned also though, so I still am not sure what the problem is.

I still have half the dialog box disappearing when I set the resolution, and the cursor problem at the desktop resolution, as mentioned above.

[Guest Big Time Software]

Just a quick tip - never assume that your brand-new computer has the latest drivers. Often this is not the case. Even if you bought the thing yesterday.

Charles

[Trooper]

I've got it on a Dell Lattitude 500Mhz with Windows 2000. It's a bit jerky, but otherwise runs.

NTM

[kunzler]

Thanks Charles, I checked in response to your post, and yes, I am running the latest drivers.

I am starting to believe that my crashes are being caused by overheating. When I run in laptop mode, I have less crashes - and when I do crash, portions of the computer case are extremely warm. Directing a fan on the computer seems to help. Over the weekend, I operated with my laptop sitting on a tray of ice (yes, very scientific) and I had no lockups. Problem is now, I can't figure how to get the ice into my docking station

[This message has been edited by kunzler (edited 08-01-2000).]

[Schrullenhaft]

kunzler - that's pretty interesting. Usually I would have thought that the "name-brand" laptops would have been a bit better designed in regards to heat-dissipation. Some of them do tend to get warm in places, usually where the CPU heatsink is attached to the case. Are there any vents on the bottom of your laptop ? If so you may want to make sure that the laptop isn't sitting on a surface that would block them (though I don't think any laptops would have vents on the bottom anymore).

Here's a device that sticks into your PC Card slot and cools your laptop (don't know how effective that it would be - depends highly on the internal airflow of the laptop):

http://www.directron.com/fan-nb.html

[kunzler]

Thanks Schrullenhaft, I ordered it. Hope it works.

By the way, the 3700 didn't last long, it is now the 3800. I wonder if overheating is part of the reason? It doesn't overheat on any other programs I have run and it locks up less when I have less graphic options enabled, so I have to think that CM is just pushing the graphics card harder than any other programs - and maybe harder than Dell intended!