postul8or

BUMP!

Please help!!!

I'm having trouble getting Demolition Racer working in Windows 2000 Professional. The game compatibility list says this game works better in Windows 2000 than Win9x (I if the guy that wrote this was on drugs). I try and launch the game and immediately the game crashes and claims to be writing some kind of a log file showing the errors. I have never been able to find where this log file is! Wondering if any of you have any ideas for me. I've tried the applicable items in the FAQ to no avail. I'll give a few of my system specs, they may be important. Celeron 1 Ghz on an ASUS P2B-F (on a Socket 370 slotket) Voodoo 3 2000 (should be fine for a game this old) 256MB Micron SDRAM 120 GB WD, 60 GB IBM and 30 GB Maxtor Hard drives Promise Ultra100 IDE Controller SB Live! Value I think those are most of the important specs. I have DirectX 8.1 installed (didn't matter nothing worked in DirectX 7, 8.0 or 8.1). One other thing I think is important to note is that I did not install the SB Live Drivers and crap utilities, I just let Windows 2000 use it's own driver. MP3s appear to play fine so not sure if this matters. For the Voodoo 3 2000 video card I had the latest official 3dfx drivers and also a 3rd party driver and had no luck. The problems did not appear to have symptoms of a video problem, the game simply crashes before it even has a chance to have a video problem! Please give me a few ideas and let me know if there are some system details that you feel would help you help me better

I read the rest of it... Add this Q & A maybe: Q: Why the hell does the game compatibility list claim the game works right away (without any changes/fixes required) yet it fails for me right away... A: Whoever submitted it never had a problem and therefore cannot help you solve it. You're so screwed sucker!

Quote: Q: How do I know if I've selected the correct executable file? A: Find the Shortcut to the game on your desktop or by clicking start, then programs... It should read "Play [game title]" or just be the name of the game. Right click this shortcut and left click "Properties" in the window that pops up. Note the file listed in the "Target:" box, this is the one you will need to enter in QFixApp. Q: How do I get my joystick/gamepad to work? (it tests fine after calibration). A: Before you click "Run" in QFixApp, click on the "Fixes" tab and then change the setting (probably to unchecked) of the box left of "EmulateJoystick" (scroll down on the list to find it). Then run the game and try using the joystick. Notice how in between these 2 FAQs that there is a transition from "the game won't even run" to "the game runs but the joystick is screwed". My question is, what do you do if after the first question the game will still not run? Like does this QFixApp do everything you need, you just have to customize all of the checkbox options till it works? I'm looking for sort of a troubleshooters guide of what to look at to make games work...

It just floors me how these companies pour millions of dollars into facilities to mass produce these video cards but they can't put $1 million into writing a 50 kb driver to work for the damn video cards. Any programmers on this board...is programming drivers really *THAT* hard?

To be honest I actually had a Riva TNT before buying the Voodoo 3/2000 and almost every game I had required a different version of the drivers so that it wouldn't randomly freeze up. I was tired of installing a different version of drivers before playing every game so I bought something at the time with reliable drivers (at the expense of a lower performing video card). It appears that there are now "driver managers" that allow you to toggle which driver is in use, which is what I said was really what was needed at the time. For sure I was not the one with the capability to program the idea for one thing. For another, it just shouldn't be necessary. When companies design drivers properly they will always be backwards compatible when adding the new features needed in the new drivers...NVIDIA failed (past tense) and maybe to the same extent still do (present tense) create a lot of incompatibilities in their drivers. It was the same thing with my AMD 486 chip, it sucked more than anything has ever sucked before. My past experience with AMD and NVIDIA was not stellar, so when people try and convince me to buy Athlons next, or buy NVIDIA video cards next I also have negative experiences to dwell on. I agree for new games NVIDIA is probably the way to go...every game I play right now will be from the Voodoo 3 era so this NVIDIA issue for the current series of questions I've been asking is a red herring. I mean fair enough I'm sure I'll be getting addicted Warcraft 3 pretty soon and will need a new card I will continue to do some searches in the forums here to see if I can answer more of my questions. I found it a little disturbing to say the least when the game compatibility list says Demolition Racer works better in W2K than Win9x since the first thing that happened to me was it didn't work at all! Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming (I bashed NVIDIA and AMD earlier, I'm sure I'll get some comments about that).

pmistry, thanks I just renamed gimme.dll to gimme.dlx and NFS Porsche worked.

I only have a Celeron 1 Ghz processor which is not much to build on in terms of getting a better video card. Also, why is everyone assuming it is the video component that is causing the problem. The symptoms to me do not clearly point in that direction. Are you really certain that a NVIDIA card would really fix the problem...

Well I guess the point with the video card is why do the games work perfectly fine in Windows Millennium but not Windows 2000. I believe the state of the WinMe drivers is about the same as the Win2k drivers. The other thing that is odd is the kind of errors I get for these games. When I try to run Demolition Racer it trys for about 0.5 seconds and then pop up a window that says "dr.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log is being created" Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed would bring up the menu screen like it wanted to load but my hard drive would just crunch away slowly...and I opened up a task manager all of my RAM is being used and all of my pagefile was used too (even when I increased it to 768MB). These just do not sound like video problems to me. Can anyone confirm? I never did try other compatibility modes with Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed so I will try that next. I'll also try a few different video drivers just to see what happens. Demolition racer was not working under any compatibility mode I tried. Admittedly, there's an extensive number of permutations of the "fixes" in the QFixApp Fixes tab that I could try. I would really prefer getting some direction from somebody that knows how to fix problems rather than just screwing around at random looking for a solution. Help! Thanks

I've tried Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed and Demolition Racer in my Windows 2000 operating system and neither of them work. Can anyone recommend what steps I should take to troubleshoot the problems I'm having? From the odd thing I read here it seems like games in Windows 2000 are pretty sensitive to the video card being used. I've got a Voodoo 3 2000 here, so which driver should I be using? Currently I think I've got the most recent one from the 3dfx website. Also, something that confused me a little bit...When I tried to use the different compatibility modes I noticed that I had the Windows 95 and Windows NT SP5 option but not the option to use Windows 98. How do I make the 98 mode available? Any help would be greatly appreciated.