major problems

[75tlc]

I just recieved my copy of Combat Mission 2 weeks ago, installed it and everything worked great(win98se). I picked up a copy of winxp pro on friday, when I did a compatability check it said combat mission would not work so i installed xp and put 98se on a different partition(fresh install)and put cm on that partition. Now when I start the game i get no intro video,the screen to load or start a new game is black except for the buttons and when i start a senario everything is white except for a few shadows and the text. I can't see units,terrain, structures anything. Needless to say I can't play it this way and I just got started and I'm suffering withdrawl symptoms. Maybe my wife sabatoged it!

My specs are:

1 ghz athlon

asus a7a266

asus gf2 gts64

256 mb ram

sb live

I also reinstalled the drivers for the video card that i was using when everything was fine but no difference.

[bodman]

Hi,

Try this. Go to your (drive letter)\program

[Gyrene]

75tlc, delete the preferences file in the CM folder and restart the game.

If that doesn't solve your problem wait for Schrullenhaft to come around.

Gyrene

[bodman]

Hi

My other reply was incomplete. I was going to say what Gyrene said.

bodman

[Schrullenhaft]

The 'intro movie' doesn't play because you don't have QuickTime installed in your WinXP installation. CMBO probably came up as 'not compatible' because Microsoft doesn't have any info on it ('it didn't sell two million copies... what is it ?'); so to err on the side of safety the called it 'incompatible'.

The graphical problem you are seeing is something that users of GeForce cards have had a problem with since Windows 2000 came out. It is a driver problem with the Nvidia drivers. There have been several recent threads about this on the Tech Support and main forums ("Not buying CM2 because..."). If you look at any of the threads mentioning Windows XP or Windows 2000 and GeForces, or 'white transparency issues', etc. you will come across this problem.

I will copy part of my post to one of these threads that covers some of the things to do in Win2K/XP.

1) Install the 21.81 or higher driver (or possibly the 7.xx or earlier drivers).

2) Turn ON FSAA. Select the 'manual' setting for the FSAA and set it to either 2X, 4X or Quincux (whatever's available other than OFF). FSAA will slow down the performance and/or limit the resolutions you can run at depending on the amount of memory and which GeForce card you have.

3) When you launch CM you may get the 'corrupted' screen where you can't read the scenario listings. Hit the ESC key, which will minimize CM. Now click on the 'Combat Mission' listed on the Task Bar and CM will remaximize. This should clear up the white transparencies that made the text impossible to read. You should now be able to proceed to the 3D screen with no problems.

4) I've seen a situation where if you have FSAA enabled that once you move in the 3D battlefield you get an endlessly repeating effect of the textures, etc. I can't remember if this was solely limited to Win9x/ME or Win2K/XP. Again, an ESC to the desktop and back clears this problem up for the rest of the CM session (it will occur again once you reload CM).

5) In game there is a possibility that the 2D info areas at the bottom of the screen may be corrupt where the white text and graphics are flashing and/or partially invisible. If the FSAA setting didn't fix this (or you're running a TNT-series card), then you may need to install an interface mod like Deanco's, which reduces the amount of white in these screens.

6) Once you finish the game or exit to save, you may run into the screen turning completely black or some other form of corruption. Perform the ESC sequence listed above and you should normally get a legible screen again. Sometimes this doesn't work or it may take several retries to finally work at this point.

I'd also suggest installing the ALI drivers for the chipset. I don't know how good the ones that come with XP are.

At the ALI website click on the 'Support' menu item on top and then select the 'Drivers' menu item on the left menu. Then select the 'Alimagik 1' chipset. From there you'll want the Northbridge chipset 'M1647' (the Southbridge drivers are unnecessary). I'd suggest downloading the v. 1.80 AGP Driver and the 1.40 AGP Utility.

ALI chipset drivers

Which video drivers did you 'reinstall' ? You can download some of the latest ones (unofficial beta releases) here:

Guru 3D

Select 'Videocard drivers' then 'Nvidia detonator drivers' and you'll be presented with a list of drivers. Make sure you download only drivers for Windows 2000 and/or XP. Don't download the driver for 'XP 64-bit' - it isn't the version of Windows XP that you're running.

[75tlc]

Thanks for the tips but nothing is helping. The game won't run under xp at all, when I start i just get a black screen with some wavy horizontal lines like when you try to set your monitor at too high a resolution.

Schrullenhaft: This problem I am having is not like the fog/transparency problems that I have seen posted. I have nothing at all showing on my screen when in a scenario except for text and the shadow under the vehicle. Everything else is blank white. When I referred to reinstalling the drivers for my geforce I was referring to the detonator 21.18 drivers that I had been using prior to upgading to xp. When in my previous installation of 98se everything worked great now when i load 98se(dual boot) nothing but problems with CM. I tried the drivers you suggested for xp but no go, the game won't load. There must be a solution but I'm not sure where to start.

[Schrullenhaft]

Delete your Preferences file and select a low resolution (640 x 480) and see what happens.

Which OS is the fresh install, WinXP ? Was CMBO a fresh install or do you have it graphically moded ?

What are your DirectX Diagnostic Display settings ? Are all of them enabled ?

Have you made any changes to your CMOS/BIOS setup settings that apply to AGP cards ? If your BIOS offers it you may want to turn off AGP Fast Writes.

You may also want to wipe out your WinXP installation and start over again. You may want to try the ALI chipset drivers I have listed above, but I'm not sure how different they may be from what comes with XP. Does XP come with drivers for all of your hardware or do you install some additional drivers ?