Zarquon Posted December 19, 2003 Share Posted December 19, 2003 To play CMBB during the holidays I've installed it on my old laptop that has a S3 Virge MX+ graphics chip. CMBB offers only 640x480 modes here. These work, but the game cannot be played because some game buttons are not visible. This seems to be a DirectX problem. The DX Diagnosis tool reports a probelem with the Direct 3D funcions. I've installed DX 9.0b but it didn't help. Any ideas? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 19, 2003 Share Posted December 19, 2003 What Windows version are you running on the laptop and what specific DirectX test fails ? Regarding what you're seeing at 640x480, this is normal, but I'm not sure exactly how. CMBB requires 800x600 as a minimum resolution for the very reason you've run into - the interface buttons do not fit onto a 640x480 screen. The DirectX routine that you select your resolution with the first time you start CM (or delete the Prefs file) can't be modified to rule out certain resolutions. Thus 640x480 is still offered, though CMBB (& CMAK) can't actually use it. Normally CMBB should come back with a message after selecting the resolution (on your way to the main splash screen) that '800x600 is the minimum resolution and CMBB can't run'. However on occasion it looks like this message can be bypassed (this happened to me in beta testing, but I can't recall doing it afterwards). I doubt that a newer S3 Virge driver (accept the agreement and go to the '290-298' section) will help here (if they're any newer than what you've got already). Do you know how much memory your Savage MX is working with ? I assume it can be either 4Mb, 8Mb or up to 16Mb (I'd guess that 8Mb may be the most common configuration). That means you may have the bare minimum to run CMBB. Anyway, what I suggest to do is find a driver installer for your current and/or last version of the video drivers. When you have this, uninstall your current video driver. You may need to go into your INF directory in your Windows/WINNT directory to remove any installer INF files associated with the S3 Savage MX (depending on the Windows version these may be any one of several OEMx.INF files). This will prevent Windows from just reinstalling the old drivers. Once you've done this, go ahead and reboot. When Windows comes back up it will attempt to identify the video chip. If you've deleted the correct files, it should most likely be unable to identify the video chip itself. DO NOT point it to a video driver as of yet. Instead install a 'SVGA' driver that Windows should default to and then reboot when required. Now reinstall DirectX 9.0b if you want to, but before doing that you need to 'kill' any programs that are running, especially anti-virus programs (which can just be 'disabled' or prevented from 'real time scanning'). The idea here is to avoid any conflicts while installing software - reboot after installing DirectX. Now 'kill' any programs and/or anti-virus programs again and attempt to install the new (or possibly same) Savage MX drivers and reboot again at the finish of this. With all of this done, attempt the Direct3D tests again in the DirectX Diagnostic. Hopefully it should pass the tests (though some features may be 'grayed out' - such as 'AGP Texture Acceleration', etc.). If you know what chipset your laptop motherboard is based on (i.e. - Intel, SiS, VIA, ALi, etc.) you may want to install the device drivers for it (which may help with some AGP issues). 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zarquon Posted December 19, 2003 Author Share Posted December 19, 2003 That's what I call customer service! Anyway, it's only a 4 MB card, W2K installed.... I'll try. Thanks! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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