Emperor & Radeon 9100 & WinXP

[s0Ma]

hi, i tried playing emperor on windows xp using a radeon 9100 128mb card. the game installed fine, started fine, the movies all played fine, but when the game menu appeared, it looks totally weird (see attached file).

anyone know what's causing this? and anyone know how to fix it?[attachment archived by Gobalopper]

[Terror]

well.... that's not good.

What windows do you use? And what drivers do you use for your radeon 9100? Also make sure you updated emperor to version 1.09, and in the case if you don't have the newest radeon9100 drivers, make sure you update them.

[s0Ma]

windows xp pro, latest ati drivers, tried both original version and 1.09 patch, and no overclocking involved whatsoever. this really bugs me out, i haven't got a clue. :)

[Gobalopper]

Please attach your EASy and DXDiag reports.

[s0Ma]

http://members.chello.se/s0ma/DxDiag.txt

http://members.chello.se/s0ma/EAsy_EA.txt

[Gobalopper]

I've seen that before long ago when the game first came out and I think the problem was ATI drivers. The latest ATI driver release has been acting odd for me as well. You could try a beta driver or an older version.

Can you actually get anywhere past the menus and into the actual game?

[s0Ma]

yes, i can actually use all the menus, no lock-ups or anything. i'll try out some different older/beta ati drivers and see if that works.

[gryphon]

If you're grafical settings are at maximun .. could you try lowering them ?

[Nyarlathotep]

*jumps up and down*... aaarrrgggg... this is the 3rd time I see this pixture and can't remember the solution... just now that is... Let me think...

[s0Ma]

yes, i've pretty much tried everything concerning graphic settings, tried disabling/enabling ati-features, etc etc. nothing works. this is weird.

[gryphon]

I'm not really that familliar with EAsy_EA.txt reports. But why does your DirectX diag say you have DirectX9, where in EAsy is states your have 7 ?

8.1 is required to play Generals. :-

[Nyarlathotep]

I'm not really that familliar with EAsy_EA.txt reports. But why does your DirectX diag say you have DirectX9, where in EAsy is states your have 7 ?

8.1 is required to play Generals. :-

The easy output can't handle win 2000/XP. It was designed for Win 9X/ME. If it encounters Win2K, XP or NT it screws up, hence why I just ask for the directx output :)

[Nyarlathotep]

At least I found the topic where I saw this before (the guys name is Radar). Unfortunately, we haven't been able to solve it in there. Funny thing is, he only experienced it AFTER he upgraded to XP.

Have you tried playing EBFD in compatibility mode ? And like Gryphon said, lower your desktop resolution to 1024x768 16bit.

[gryphon]

After you're screen displayes the above picture, can you still alt-tab or use ctrl-alt-del to switch back to your desktop or does your computer just lock-up compleatly ?

[ you could make a screenshot of it, so I would think your computers runs just fine, just Emperor that crashes. . ]

And as a follow up, ths the only game you play with this kind of grafical requirments, or are there more you play. If there are more, I recon they don't give any problems what-so-ever ?

[Nyarlathotep]

As far as I understand the problem from previous experiences, the pc or game do not lock up. There's just no way in telling where to press to proceed with the game, due to the screwed up screen. For example, the only way to quit the game when it's in the state of the picture, is to press ctrl-alt-del, because the button to end the game isn't showing up.

[s0Ma]

hi! i tried lowering desktop res to 1024x768 16-bit, yielded no results, also tried all the compatibility-modes, and all NT-modes work, but both win95 and win98/winme bombs me back to desktop after the two intro movies.

i'm not able to alt-tab, either, cause if i do, i'm greeted with a completely black screen once i alt-tab back to the game, and then i have to kill it using process manager. i've successfully ran several other westwood titles on this machine, using the exact same settings for everything. both renegade and c&c generals work fine, for example.

i don't think the radeon is the problem here, since that other guy (Radar) from what i could tell, ran it on a geforce-card. my next quest is to create another partition and install win98 on it, and see if it runs from there.

i'll report back about what happens.

thanks :)

[number6]

You may want to be sure that you don't have any lingering driver files in your windowssystem32 directory. I know with the ATI video cards they want you to uninstall the old drivers before installing the newer ones. Did you uninstall the other drivers before installing the newer ones? This could explain why the newer games are working, but emperor is not. I am of course just going on hunches at this point, but since I have no idea how carefully you have followed ATI's upgrade instructions I thought I would ask.

[s0Ma]

i've now tried to run the game both in winme and win98se, and both versions bomb me back to desktop after the first two movies. just for the heck of it, i also made a vanilla install of winxp, installing only the earliest drivers i could find for the radeon 9100, and it still displayed the rainbow-coloured menu. i guess i'm out of luck, seems emperor doesn't like my 9100 card one bit. :)

anyway, next thing is to dig up an old geforce-card and see how things go with that. oh well. :) thanks for the answers & suggestions everyone.

[s0Ma]

oh yeah; also (i dunno if this has been mentioned before), while searching for answers, i stumbled across this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=09DAC794-B803-4B92-83C9-6A9E8B801434

it's the Windows Application Compatiblity Toolkit, and i found a setting for Emperor in there, which i thought might be interesting to other people having problems with this game while running Windows XP. according to this setting, Emperor needs a fix called EmulateSlowCPU in order to run properly under XP, which is described like this:

"This compatibility fix modifies the return values of QueryPerformanceCounter and QueryPerformanceFrequency in order to emulate those expected from performance checking routines to emulate slower processors. If +timeGetTime is specified as a command line, timeGetTime will never return the same value on consecutive calls."

it didn't help me (since i still have the damn rainbows), but it might help someone else having problems with slowdowns or anything of the kind.

[Terror]

oh yeah; also (i dunno if this has been mentioned before), while searching for answers, i stumbled across this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=09DAC794-B803-4B92-83C9-6A9E8B801434

it's the Windows Application Compatiblity Toolkit, and i found a setting for Emperor in there, which i thought might be interesting to other people having problems with this game while running Windows XP. according to this setting, Emperor needs a fix called EmulateSlowCPU in order to run properly under XP, which is described like this:

"This compatibility fix modifies the return values of QueryPerformanceCounter and QueryPerformanceFrequency in order to emulate those expected from performance checking routines to emulate slower processors. If +timeGetTime is specified as a command line, timeGetTime will never return the same value on consecutive calls."

it didn't help me (since i still have the damn rainbows), but it might help someone else having problems with slowdowns or anything of the kind.

well to be honest, it did help me :) . My emperor ran too fast when i used XP, untill a sizable force was build, but since i never played EMP anymore i didn't realy care. I have to go eat now, and go to a party... so more help later. :)