EB and DirectX 9

[Blue Death]

Hello Technical Help Forum,

My problem is not one of a CTD within EB, but rather a problem with starting EB itself.

When I run the application file, it says "Rome: Total War failed to find DirectX 9, which is required for the game to run. Please reinstall DirectX."

The thing is, I have DirectX9 installed, maybe it cannot find the folder?

I am using EB with BI.exe (1.6) if it makes a difference, although I tried this with both vanilla RTW and vanilla BI (several times) so I don't think that's the case.


Any help is appreciated.

[bovi]

Have you run dxdiag? That will tell you if some part of DirectX is damaged or missing.

[Blue Death]

Hmm... After running dxdiag, it said there were no problems with the DirectX files or anything else, though I did get a few error messages...

"The procedure entry point OpenVxDHandle could not be located in the dynamic link library Kernel32.dll"
"There may have been a problem accessing DirectInput the last time this program was used. Would you like to bypass DirectInput this time?" Yes/No

When I clicked Yes, nothing else happens. But when I clicked No, dxdiag crashes...
After repeating this several times, Windows opened a pop-up telling me to download the August 2008 update. I did, and several dozen WinRar files (which I know how to extract) filled the folder. Only a few of them are labelled Aug 2008, many of them have 2007 or 2006.

Then there's something called dxnt.rar, and it's quite a large file so I suspect it does something...

[Tellos Athenaios]

Ehrm? What Windows version are you using? It's got to be way outdated for its kernel not to work with Microsofts very own hard-pushed propietary DirectX-ware.

[Blue Death]

Outdated? Odd, I'm using Vista...

[Tellos Athenaios]

Very odd, because Vista has (edit: both DirectX 10 and) DirectX 9.0c by default. <_<

Did you let RomeTW install its DirectX 9.0b?
First try to see if a re-install of DirectX 9.0c fixes the problems if not I think the issue lies with RomeTW and your Vista not getting along with eachother very well; so I'd suggest re-installing RTW. When you re-install RTW make sure to install RTW to somewhere under your home directory and forbid it to install DirectX 9.0b. Verify you have a working RTW install first, before attempting to install EB.

[bovi]

Crashing when running dxdiag is not a good sign. The problem may lie with DirectX, your display driver, or the display card itself. Have you upgraded your display driver lately? Particularly Nvidia drivers are in my experience often buggy (the main reason why I've changed to only use ATI cards).

There is also a procedure that you can follow with a tool to remove DirectX to be able to reinstall it from scratch (it won't ever let you downgrade any component), but it's fraught with danger if you do something wrong, meaning you'll probably have to reinstall Windows if you screw up. I did this procedure lots of times when I was troubleshooting an Nvidia card back in the day, but I can't remember the tool I used. I'm sure you can find it with Google.

[Blue Death]

Out of curiosity, is it possible that installing DirectX 10 might work? I would prefer avoiding an entire re-installation of Windows if at all possible...
That being said, since there is no easy way to remove DirectX, if it does not help solve the problem then there is no point.

[Tellos Athenaios]

DirectX 10 is AFAIK not backwards compatible with DirectX 9, and at any rate your Vista should have both. Bovi is absolutely right when he says a crashing dxdiag is *not* a good sign.

If in doubt, backup your HDD (or at least the data you want to keep for certain) to another one, and re-install Vista.

[Blue Death]

Well, after considerable deliberation(and a few other solutions) I decided to try a System Restore from about 2 weeks ago.

I don't exactly know what it did, but whatever it did, it worked!

In some ways, this was a good thing. It actually got me to register here after lurking for a month


Thanks for the help, Bovi and Tellos Athenaios.