Screen Lock Up

[mosdwt]

Hi,
My son has a PC:
Pentium 3 450 Mhz, Gigabyte GA-6VXE+ motherboard with VIA Apollo chipset, 128 MB RAM and a Creative RIVA TNT2 32 MB AGP graphics card.

The problem is that he recently bought the game Black and White. When he runs the game after it has been installed the game starts up with the first couple of title intro screens and then when it attempts to move into the game the screen goes blank and locks up. The machine must then be re-booted.

I have tried reformatting the hard drive and completely reinstalling windows and all his programs, installing the latest version 7 and 8 of Direct X, installing the latest drivers for the graphics card, changing the default display setting to 800 x 600.
I have run diag.exe diagnostics and all the tests work OK. There are no conflicts showing up in the Windows system details.

His other games work OK on his system.

Is there any way of finding out just what is causing the problem?

David

[lysdexia]

Have you checked it is working on another PC? It may be just a faulty game.

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ya think?

[BigBlue66]

Hi and Welcome,

Well, based on what you have said about there being no conflicts or problems with the system other than that particular game, it sounds to me like it may be a bad copy of Black and White.

Is there an option to run the game from the CD? Does the game require the CD to run? Or, does it run completely off the harddrive?

Have you checked the system requirements for the game? Does the system stack up to at least the minumum recommendations? If the system has enough ooommph to run the game, then it is probably a bad copy or a bad install.

Post back with answers to the above questions and we'll go from there. Also include operating system and harddrive specs.

Cheers,

Big Blue 66


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Woe is me.

[mosdwt]

Hi
I think the game requires the CD to run.
The PC meets the required specification to run the game.

I have also installed it on my PC with a slower 8MB grahics card and it ran OK but the graphics were jerky and slow.

The system has a 6 GB Seagate HD and operating system is Windows 98

Cheers

Calisto

[BigBlue66]

Hi,

OK, maybe the next thing to do is run ScanDisk and Defrag the harddrive.

While attempting to play the game, do not have any other programs running in the background, except for Explorer and Systray. If you already do that, then it might be time to uninstall the game, run scandisk and defrag, and try installing the game again. Then, run scandisk and defrag again.

As for the CD-ROM, is it new or old compared to the one in your machine? You might try running a cleaner CD in his CD-ROM.

How do your systems compare in relation to processor and amount of RAM? Have you tried System File Checker on his system to check for corrupted system files? If not, may as well give that a shot too.

Hang tight. We'll figger it out sooner or later. The most important thing is to not have any other programs running, except the ones mentioned above, while trying to play the game. Scandisk, defrag, system file checker, a comparison of systems, etc. wouldn't hurt either.

Post back with progress and/or answers to above.

Good luck.

Big Blue 66


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Woe is me.