Maximum PC

Hey guys, I went from a 7900GS OC'ed edition card to a 9800GTX card and now Star Trek Armada is all whacked out. The intro movie and the menu are okay, but as soon as I push play for skirmish, the screen looks all skewed and then there's major issues inside the game.

Any ideas?

Stupid question: Did you install the right drivers?

I just went to nvidia's website and selected the type of card I have and it pointed me int he direction.

It reads as the correct card in the properties menu. This is the driver version: 6.14.13.142

Did you uninstall the old driver first, then install the new driver....or just overwrite the old driver....if you did the latter, you have a corrupt install of the driver.

Did you try win 98 or xp compatibility mode?

Did you patch the game?

http://armada2.filefront.com/file/Star_ ... atch;34267

Nasty

Alright, so I uninstalled the card in Properties and uninstalled the driver, reboot and tried everything again from scratch. Changed some settings in the Nvidia control panel, changed compatibility modes for the game, I tinkered with everything. No dice. I'm so fucking pissed. I may actually just put the old frickin card back in the system. It's totally pisses me off.

Also read this on some random forum:

I installed Star Trek Armada over the weekend, it installs fine but will nto run at all. The reason being Nvidia has removed TnL support on new models and Armada runs on TnL.
Now to make this and my other old games work again all I need to do is get a 2series Nvidia card or a ATI card as they still have TnL.

Make any sense? WTF is TNL?

TnL = Transform and Lighting = the basic requirement for being a modern GPU. So whoever said that to you is spouting bullshit.

I can't seem to figure out anything else, other than you could try running it in a VM like VirtualBox.

LOL Okay. So any ideas? I'm seeing people are having a lot of issues on, say, 8-10 year old + games. Some people have these games working on higher cards than the 9800 and most have problems...

I have no problems running old games on my 6970s that are Crossfired. What you have to do if you have two graphic cards in Crossfire or SLI is to shut one card down in the driver. Old games had only one card to run them and were written for only one card....so that is what you run. Also right click on the .exe of the game and run it in either win98 or xp sp3 mode and the games will run just fine. I am running win 7 Pro 64 bit and have no problems running Baldur's Gate one and two so far. Icewind Dale one and two and Neverwinter night one and two is next in the quay. DO NOT forget to fully update your games BEFORE you run them.

Nasty

Silly question, but you are running around a 500W power supply correct?

How did you know?

And nasty, I am only running the single GTX card and I've tried it in all the compatibility modes

Considering that some older games have issues with newer OS's for some reason or another... Let's try a VM if you can get your hands on an older OS. VirtualBox has experimental support for DirectX virtualization. But I don't know how well this works, or how far down the line in OS's you can go.

I know VirtualPC (from Microsoft) emulates a S3 Trio, but I think that's a 2D accelerator.

Have you fully patch the game?

Nasty

All I've done was swap out the 7900GS Extreme for the 9800GTX and updated the drivers. Everything worked perfectly before that.

I am running XP with all the most current updates applied to the game and OS. Literally, everything was working fine before the video card swap.

...so how did you update the drivers? Uninstall the old drivers first, then install the new drivers after you rebooted, or just install the new driver over the old?...that is a big no-no by the way.

Nasty

I physically installed the 9800GTX. I then went to the nVidia website and downloaded the current drivers for the card. I then installed the drivers right over the old ones... After I gaffed that install I tried to uninstall all the drivers and delete the VGA Adapter out of the devices menu and then start over. Oh hell I'm lost now lol

After tweaking things in the nVidia panel and doing a bunch of things, now the game kicks to windows as soon as it's finished loading lol I may have to just uninstall EVERYTHING game, game updates, the MP addon I am running, AND all the video card stuff and try again. Chaosdsm is sending me his 750GB SATA drive which I will be using as storage. Maybe I'll do all of this when I put that in.

Shut off your antivirus!

Uninstall the driver/drivers using the control panel install/uninstall app., say no to reboot.

Look for and delete the Nvidia video card folder, empty the recycle bin.

Download and install Ccleaner, use the registry section of the app to clean out the registry.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner

Reboot.

Cancel both popups.

Shut off your antivirus!

Install the new driver and reboot as the app asks.

The video card should run fine now...if you followed the instructions that is.

Nasty

I will try these instructions to a tee as soon as I get home! Thanks!!!!

Hey Nasty, followed these to the letter. Wasn't hard and everything went smooth but I'm still having the artifacts in Armada. Luckily, Starfleet Command III works I guess lol

Did you right click on the game .exe, choose properties and then compatibility mode....choose win 98 mode and see if that clears up the video.

If you are running two cards in SLI or Crossfire you MUST shut off one card or it will cause corruption in the video colors and picture.

Nasty