why must I submit to this contrived process?

[Inigo Montoya]

I entered this board hoping to find information that would enable my to finally get M:TW up and running. However, I found nothing in the tech section that directly addressed my problem(s). I have spent many hours (literally) on the phone with Activision Tech Support (useless), posted my problem on a couple of other boards (no response as yet) and even e-mailed Creative Assembly. I wanted to cover all my bases by posting the problem here, hoping that someone, somewhere would be able to help me out. However, I find that in order to get help from people who obviously know a lot more about the game than I do (obviously, because their games actually WORK ), I must first go through some sort of initiation process before I am allowed to submit a topic to the help forum.

Might I suggest that you allow new members, or Junior Woodchucks, or whatever it is that you call them to post both here and in the help forum, as I would imagine a lot of people first come here looking for help? Barring that, could you please Promote me for one day so I can post my problem - you may then Demote me and I will feel neither ashamed nor resentful. After I have actually been able to play this game, I will return and attempt to gain legitimate promotion through the collected wisdom of my postings.

Thank you.

[Demon of Light]

Hello Inigo. Did I mention that I have 6 fingers on my right hand?

The initiation process is indeed a little troublesome but it serves a purpose. It serves to deter people who obviously have no business being here. The process needs be at least a little annoying if it is to have the desired result.

The promotion is almost always pending so you'll not have to wait long.

As for your problem, post it here and I will transfer it to the help section myself under whatever title you intruct me to.

[Portuguese Rebel]

Hi dude i know its a pain to be a newbie here, but it is only for a few days. Anyway you can ask what you want and people will answer. You can even ask the moderator to move the thread to the propper place

[Inigo Montoya]

For those that have offered to help, thanks very much....

Here's the deal:

I've installed M:TW - both patched and, later, re-installed and unpatched. When I try to start the game, I get the little slate-colored Total War pop-up window and then the screen goes blank and my system hard-locks (have to cold boot to get it back up). I've never been able to get the game to run.

My system:

Windows 98SE
P3-733
320 MB 133 SDRAM
GeForce4 MX 440
Soudblaster Live Platinum
DirectX 8.1 (also tried 9.0)
Intel CA810E mobo with on-board sound and video DISABLED IN BIOS

I have played with all of my sound and video system settings, rolled back my DirectX to 8.1, edited my registry, uninstalled and reinstalled all of my drivers - in short, I have done every possible thing I could think of. Nothing has helped at all.

I did install the game on another machine and it worked - but very slowly, as that machine does not have enough graphic power to run the game. So I know my CDs are actually good.

[Demon of Light]

Topic is called Inigo Montoya's question and is in the Apothacary.

[Hakonarson]

And in answer to yuor original quaestoin, you must submit to this contrived process because you chose to be here, because this board is run bay amateurs as a private concern for the public good, and because they decide how to run it.

Have a nicer day

[Inigo Montoya]

I knew someone out there would come through and help me get it where it needed to be I also knew someone out there would come through with a lesson in Internet etiquette and a you chose to come here reminder.

Thanks, Demon of Light and Hakonarson, but mainly Demon of Light for actually offering to be helpful.

[Kraellin]

when you say you 'rolled back' dx9 to 8.1, what exactly did you do?

but, since you were having troubles before you put dx9 on there, i'll assume for the moment that you 'rolled back' directx ok. so, the next thing that comes up after the total war logo is the video thing, isnt it? if you're locking up right after the logo screen, i'd check windows media player (wmp). i forget what version is required for mtw, but update it. you might also have an odd codec in wmp if you've been playing a lot of music downloaded off the web. again, update wmp.

now, if i've got that backwards and you are seeing the opening video and you're hanging up after that, then the next thing that loads is the main menu. if you're locking up loading that, then you're going to need to change vid card drivers. and with TW games, newest isnt necessarily the best. you've also got an older system, so i'd recommend the 30.82's. those seem to work fairly well with a lot of folks and is about the right generation for your hardware and o/s.

also, run dxdiag and do all the tests. if you get an error there, other than those silly whql driver messages, then you've either got a problem with directx or your vid card or sound card, depending on the error you get.

since you didnt say, i'll assume you're running an agp card. if not, ignore this one. go into bios and set your agp aperture to 1/2 of whatever of your vid card memory is.

the sb live card....go into dxdiag again and slide the sound hardware acceleration slider all the way to the left.

win98se... go into accessories, system tools, system info and load it up. go into one of the top areas, i forget the name, and look for device conflicts. note any that show up. not all that may show up are necessarily critical, but do write them down and fix any you can.

while in system info, check the irqs. if your sound card and vid card are on the same irq, you're going to need to change that. generally, you want sound on irq 5 and vid on 7 or 9 or 11. also look for any irq's that are loaded with LOTS of devices, like more than 2 on one irq.

do a con-alt-del and turn off all the tasks there except systray and explorer.

also, while in system tools, go into the 'tools' menu and find the one for msconfig or configuration. load that up and go to the right tab and click on it. this is stuff that your machine is loading up at boot time. if you're familiar with your software you can prolly tell what most of the stuff is there. turn off any that you dont really need and reboot the machine when it asks.

turn off all anti-virus stuff and all microsoft office and microsoft works stuff.

go into desktop, settings, advanced and look for your monitor tab, if you have one. check to make sure it's not running a dual display.

while there, look around through the other tabs and see if you can find a 'pci textures' setting. if your card is an agp card, set this setting to like 5 or even 2.

go into windows safe mode. right click on 'my computer' and find device manager. make sure your onboard intel card is disabled there. it shld show either a yellow question mark by it or a yellow exclamation point.

while in windows safe mode, device manager, look at all your other devices and note any others that may have a yellow question mark or exclamation point next to them. also look for dual entries of devices. some will actually have them and shld have them, some may have dual entries and shldnt.

run a defrag of your system.

run a scandisk from dos, not windows.

run an anti-virus sweep.

while in desktop, settings, advanced, turn off anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering.

send me a box of cuban cigars.

K.

[Inigo Montoya]

thanks for the post.... I've actually done most of those things (I spend a lot of time with computers). However, yours is the first specific mention I've ever seen of WMP. My version is 6.4.something or another - it's listed as the minimum requirement for the game.

The game hangs BEFORE it loads/plays any video at all. The pop-up title window comes up, and then the screen goes blank (as if it were getting ready to play video), the HD spins down, the CD-ROM spins up briefly and then back down, and nothing else happens - except I push the Reset button and wait for my machine to come back up.

As for rolling back DirectX, I used DXBuster to get most of it out, then I edited the registry and deleted the rest of it by myself (yes, I do know what I was doing). Then I reinstalled 8.1 clean and ran dxdiag and all tests (no problems).

My video card is PCI. I've played with every setting it has - filtering, AA, acceleration - as well as sound acceleration. I've turned them up, down, on, off and everything in between, in all combinations. None of them have worked.

There are no IRQ conflicts detected, although my sound card is on IRQ 10 and video on 11.

I've shut down every possible program before starting the game. No joy.

There has to be something small and stupid that I'm just missing.... I find it hard to believe that this game is so much more complex than everything else I run on this machine. I've got a bunch of driving sims that run with minimal tweaking - and all in-game tweaks, not front-end BIOS/driver/system tweaks. Thanks for all of your suggestions - I'm going to delve into Media Player and see if that does anything good.

[KukriKhan]

Hi Inigo Montoya, welcome to the.Org

Years ago, I think I played that AOL wave I am Inigo Montoya - your killed my father, prepare to die a thousand times a day in chat rooms.

The link to the post that Demon of Light graciously made on your behalf is here:
http://www.totalwar.org/cgi-bin....;t=8745

I can appreciate your frustration and desperation in trying vainly to get your copy of the game to work. There are many helping hands here willing and able to assist you with virtually any problem you have, be it technical, strategic, or personal. We have a fine group of mature, knowledgeable, helpful folks from around the world - encompassing over 40 countries, ranging in age from 12 to over 60, with experience levels from ultra-n00b's to IT professionals to PhD's in English Literature and Muslim Studies, Social Scientists and Physicists.

And blue-collar slobs like me, whom they ask to take a look at new registerees, to see if they 'play well with others', and look like they want to be part of a no fire zone environment to cuss and discuss TotalWar games.

I'm sorry our little hoop-jumping requirement got you all hot and bothered...and I can see where you're coming from, having chronicled your having contacted everyone but Odin to solve your problem.

Trust me. There's over 4,000 patrons here. Someone will know your particular 'fix' and give it to you.

My own, off-the-wall guess, is a Windows Media Player problem. You say you get the TW splash screen, then black and crash-to-desktop. What MTW is trying to do is summon WMP to run the intro movie. Do you have WMP? If yes, then something else is up. And the tech boys will undoubtedly be jumping on your problem soon.

oops, looks like Kraellin got in before me

[Inigo Montoya]

TWO VOTES FOR WMP

That's the strongest advice I've gotten as yet. I have version 6.4.07.1124 - same version on this machine and the machine that I was able to run the game on. However, I haven't done much to MP on my own, but have had Quicktime, Real Media Player and various others installed at one time or another. I don't know if that has somehow affected it or not. The only question I have is how to determine whether it's using the correct codecs or not.

I'm not really hot or bothered at you guys or your policies - just extremely frustrated that I've not been able to get this game to run despite 3 solid weeks of trying. I post on a lot of racing boards, and a couple are very militant with their rules regarding exactly what can go exactly where. I didn't want to post a tech request in this forum, just because it seemed that you had a specific place for those questions.

At any rate, thanks to everyone who has tried to help me out. If I ever get this game working, I'll find something new to rant on.

[KukriKhan]

Inigo Montoya wrote: ... post on a lot of racing boards, and a couple are very militant with their rules regarding exactly what can go exactly where. I didn't want to post a tech request in this forum, just because it seemed that you had a specific place for those questions...

gotcha, m8. We're actually working on that. Meanwhile, to your prob: WMP current version is 9.0, might be time to upgrade. MTW worked OK on my rig (1G Athlon, 8mb Vid, 128 RAM, over WinME) w/WMP 7.4 on game-release. Upp'ed to 9.0 last week & still good. Need links?

[Hakonarson]

Quote[/b] (Inigo Montoya @ July 05 2003,20:46)]I knew someone out there would come through and help me get it where it needed to be I also knew someone out there would come through with a lesson in Internet etiquette and a you chose to come here reminder.

Thanks, Demon of Light and Hakonarson, but mainly Demon of Light for actually offering to be helpful.

Fair enough - I'd have been more helpful if I could- but it might's well be Ferengi to me

[Inigo Montoya]

Thanks for the advice I've gone through the codecs on the two machines and there are indeed some listed on the one that works that aren't on my gaming rig. Most games install any necessary codecs as part of the setup, though - but I guess it's possible MTW uses something that is normally there that has somehow gotten removed/corrupted/disabled on my computer.

Does anyone happen to know what codecs are used by the intro video of MTW?

[KukriKhan]

Quote[/b] (Hakonarson @ July 05 2003,20:18)]

Quote[/b] (Inigo Montoya @ July 05 2003,20:46)]I knew someone out there would come through and help me get it where it needed to be I also knew someone out there would come through with a lesson in Internet etiquette and a you chose to come here reminder.

Thanks, Demon of Light and Hakonarson, but mainly Demon of Light for actually offering to be helpful.

Fair enough - I'd have been more helpful if I could- but it might's well be Ferengi to me

Heh, Hakonarson. Your contribution duly noted. Thanks for helping out in the absence of moderators.

[pdoan8]

Try WMP 7 before trying WMP 9 (Win98 SE is the lowest limit for WMP 9). WMP should be your default media player.

Also, you may want to try different set of video driver. I have Win98 FE and GF4 Ti card and I use 30.82 driver (4.13.01.3082). Works very well for all games. It's the same driver that I use with my old GF2 MX before upgrading to GF4 Ti.

[Inigo Montoya]

WHOOO-HOOOOO

Thanks to everyone who chimed in.

I downloaded and re-installed WMP 6.4 (thanks KukriKhan and Kraellin) from Microsoft (gotta hunt for it to get that version).

I also d-l'd nVidia 30.82 drivers (thanks pdoan8).

This took forever because my DSL is down and I'm stuck with 33.6 dial-up.

I re-booted several times to get everything happy and then ran dxdiag to make sure it was copacetic.

I started M:TW, fully expecting to be pressing the Reset button shortly, and.... BAM

Medieval.... Total War

I don't know which tweak actually fixed things - I strongly suspect that both had something to do with it. Now I have to go to another forum and post this solution to two guys with the same problem.

But first I'm going to slaughter the French.


Thanks again

[Hoplite]

I know this comes a bit late, but if you create a blank text file called 'skipcredits.txt' in the main game directory, it causes the game to directly to the main menu, without the animations.

[Inigo Montoya]

Great... Now I have to see if I can re-create my system lock, so I can test Hoplite's solution and find out definitively if that was the problem (I'm a programmer by trade and obsessive/compulsive by nature - or maybe vice versa). Actually I would be interested to see if the game would run on my system as was, as long as it skipped the intro. Ah well, too late now.

[Kraellin]

already posted a response to your getting it going in the other thread you started after getting things fixed, but gratz again.

just as a follow-up on some of the things you mentioned in this thread, Creative Assembly takes some non-standard routes in how they do graphics stuff. they pretty much have pressed the limits to try and get 25,000 plus men on the field of battle, and thus a few shortcuts and non-standard approaches seem to have been used. this sometimes plays hell with various user machine set-ups, particularly in the vid card area.

i'd also second what someone else said about win media player possibly not being your default player and that this may have affected things...not sure. we tend to poke and prod and do a LOT of guessing around here ;) myself, i keep 3 large hammers near my machines to remind them that they arent indispensible.

it always bugs me too that ibm compatibles and microsoft were the ones to win out in the pc wars. we're all basically still using 8088 machines with a LOT of patches and bug fixes and work-arounds. fun stuff, but it does employ a LOT of folks this way ;) and as my brother is fond of saying, 'what would be the fun if it all worked?'

Kukri, or one of the other mods, i think we can move this thread and the other one to the apothecary now. i'll use it in the solutions thread over there.

oh, and welcome to the .org, inigo (boy, do i want to spell that indigo).

K.

[KukriKhan]

Moved to the Apothecary, so Kraellin can play with it.