MTW Technical Help FAQ
Contents
Getting MTW To Run
Medieval Total War was released in 2002, and advancements in video cards and OS changes have not been kind. There has been no support since the 2.01 patch for Viking Invasion, and there are many problems getting MTW to run on newer systems.
Video Cards and Drivers
The biggest issues running MTW have been with nVidia video cards of the 8/9XXX series. With these cards, there is usually a CTD as soon as the campaign is started. peter_de123 spent a lot of time and hunted down the culprits, two .bif image files that apparently crash when rendered on these cards. He was able to replace the two .bif files (the Previous and Next buttons on the campaign map) with image files from the Napoleon:Total War mod, and he no longer had the CTD. Here is the thread discussion. A zip with the 2 replacement .bif files can be found here. These two file should be placed in the "Medieval - Total War\campmap\buttons" directory.
The button fix gets most people past the campaign CTD, but there are still some issues in the battle map. With the 8/9XXX series, rendering and mouse control of units on the battle field can be very iffy. vigilantevil worked with the nVidia control panel and came up with the magic combination of settings to get around this problem. Here is the discussion, this works for both STW and MTW. The control panel settings should be set for the MedievalTW.exe executable, with the following settings:
- Anisotropic filtering: Off
- Antialiasing - Gamma correction: Off
- Antialiasing - Mode: Off
- Antialiasing - Setting: None
- Antialiasing - Transparency: Off
- CUDA - GPUs: All
- Max prerendered frames: 8
- Multi-display/mixed GPU acceleration: Single display performance mode
- Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
- Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Allow
- Texture filtering - Quality: High Quality
- Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: Off
- Threaded optimization: Off
- Triple buffering: Off
- Texture filtering - Anisotropic filter optimization: Off
- Vertical sync: Force on
Networking Problems
Issues with multiplayer
Sound Issues
Screen Resolutions
A problem has been seen with Windows Vista and 7, where the screen resolution options are limited to low and ugly. Thread discussion here. Apparently this is caused by having too much system memory available. You can set the system maximum memory to 2 GB and this should sort out the problem (set it back when not playing the game...).
Sepheus created a DirectDraw wrapper that can be used instead of mucking about with the system settings. When placed in the MTW top level directory, it will return 2Gb when MTW queries the memory size. Thread Discussion here.
Windows Vista and Windows 7
MTW will run on Vista and Win7, assuming other issues with video cards don't come up. If you are having trouble getting it to run, there are a few things you can do to improve the experience.
- Try running MTW under compatibility mode, either WinXP or Win2000. This might be necessary if you have the 64-bit version of the OS.
- Try turning off UAC on Vista.
- If other programs are running and are minimized, sometimes MTW will switch repeatedly between minimized and active. Either exit the other programs, or leave them opened up.
Other Issues and Tweaks
- Adding an empty file named "skipcredits.txt" to the top level "Medieval - Total War" directory will keep the intro movies from playing, which might be causing problems on startup.
- Some machines will experience long load times (several minutes) when switching between the campaign and battle maps. It is thought that this is due to an ATI Hypermemory issue on Win XP, but this is not confirmed. Thread discussion here.
.Org Resources
The .Org has the Apothecary forum for questions and technical help for all Total War Games. Apothecary
There is also the Tech Library, that contains archived threads and posts and is updated fairly regularly. Tech Library
TBD - need some more knowledgeable members to contribute to this page. Would be nice if some of the mods from the Apothecary could put in their 2 cents. I run ATI cards, so I don't have enough experience with the main issues. ;)
