Help!!!

[Jagger]

I haven't played Medieval Total War in about 8 or 9 months but I suddenly had the itch.

MTW/Viking is still installed and the game worked fine in the past. Now I try to start the game and I receive the following error message: Unable to initialize Direct3D....

I know MTW/Viking worked in the past with my system. I haven't made any major changes and everything else works fine. I have Windows XP on my Compaq computer. I am using the internal video chip, VIA/S3G Unichrome IGP. I know the game worked last year with this same setup.

Any ideas on solving this problem?

I badly need my Medieval fix!!

[dgfred]

Time for a PM to Geezer57 , he will try to help.

[EatYerGreens]

Regular visits to Windows update may have caused you to upgrade to a version of Direct-X which your graphics chip is incompatable with. (They do warn to be sure that your gfx card is declared by the manufacturer to compatible with the latest release of DX).

Of course, recent versions of DX always warn they cannot be uninstalled and, whilst true, it's not the end of the world but it will entail doing a 'clean install' of Windows. In other words going back to square one using your XP master CD to start from scratch.

It's a bind to re-download every Windows update from the past few years all over again but at least you can pick and choose which updates to accept and stop at the version of DX you last recall allowed MTW to work properly. You could even stick to using the version of DX supplied on the MTW CD itself.

The only problem is that some of your newer applications and games will require the newer versions of Direct X for THEM to work. Choose one or the other.

[m52nickerson]

Have you updated Direct X?

EatYerGreens posted right as I was typing!