Zaragon

I couldn't get ANY OpenGL games running on my machine until I installed GlideXP (do a search, the site escapes me at the moment). At any rate it fixes some OpenGL issues as well (such as allowing me to actually RUN jDoom), and made Diablo II quit crashing when I alt-tabbed. I'd suggest using the x3dfx community drivers from voodoofiles, those seem to be the most stable by far.

There's a knowledge base article on this problem: Q315539 Device Manager Does Not Display Devices That Are Not Connected to the Windows XP-Based Computer (Q315539) Device Manager displays only non-Plug and Play devices, drivers, and printers when you click Show hidden devices on the View menu. Devices that you install that are not connected to the computer (such as a Universal Serial Bus [uSB] device or "ghosted" devices) are not displayed in Device Manager, even when you click Show hidden devices . There's instructions on how to work around the behavior in the article.

Never mind, I got it. It seems to be related in some weird way to the autosave not working. I can't overwrite existing savegames either--it "says" it is saving, but it doesn't actually work. I have to delete the games manually in explorer. At any rate, the problem stemmed from the autosave, for some reason it decided it was going to start crashing rather than just gracefully ignore the fact it could save. Manually deleted the autosave slot and it is back to its previous behavior (autosave not working, but the game isn't crashing. I never would have figured it out with the application compatability toolkit from M$-- I used QFixApp to trace the windows calls and noticed the last thing it did before it dumped was try and access the autosave.

Right after I said it was working fine, too. It did, up to a certain point. When you get to the point where you leave Prague and go to Vienna, it dumps me to the desktop when I try and exit Prague. I installed it on my other machine (Win95), copied my savegames over, and it worked fine. So, I saved it there, copied the saves back to my WinXP box, and loaded up the save I made in Vienna. It loads up and I can walk around just fine. As soon as I try to go through the door into my haven, it dumps to the desktop again. I've tried both the 95 and 98/ME compatability mode settings without any change in behavior. Does anyone out there have ANY idea how I can find out what the game is trying to do right before it dumps to the desktop? It seems to have problems with saving games too... it won't overwrite existing saves (even though it says it does). I have to manually delete the slot in explorer before I can make a new save there. I wonder if that is related somehow... Grrr... between Diablo II crashing on alt-tab, Need For Speed 3 having some weird keyboard lag problem, and this... I'm beginning to get a bit frustrated...

Couple more data points: Alt-tab from Starcraft works fine. Alt-tab from Need for speed High Stakes correctly brings you back to the desktop, but upon returning to the game the monitor is blank. I can still alt-tab back to the desktop again and kill it. Considering Win98 simply ignored alt-tabs in NFS:HS, I suppose this is acceptable. I think I might have figured out what my problem is (though it is based on a very small sample set, I admit). WinXP, unlike win98, tries to draw the alt-tab box (with the list of applications to switch to) while you are still inside the game, as opposed to waiting until the desktop is redrawn. This appears to work in directdraw and direct3d games, but causes a infinite loop crash when in Glide mode. I will test my hypothesis tonight by setting D2 to run in Direct3D mode and see if it still crashes. If not, I will pursue the problem further on the voodoo boards because at that point it is really not an XP issue...

Okay, this is annoying. Alt-tab from diablo 2 results in an instant crash. Quote: EventType: 0xEA - Thread Stuck in Device Driver // // The driver for the display device got stuck in an infinite loop. This // usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device // driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your // display device vendor for any driver updates. I haven't had time to check and see if Diablo II is the only game that does it. Also, I'm able to mostly fix the mouse feel by setting the following keys: MouseSensitivity 0 MouseSpeed 1 MouseThreshold1 7 MouseThreshold2 8 However the fix disappears on the next boot... but the values in the registry stay the same! WTF? System: WinXP Home Edition Athlon 750 512MB RAM DPT 2144UW SCSI Host Adapter UltraPlextor Wide CD ROM Voodoo 5500 video board (I have a set of 3rdparty drivers from voodoofiles).

That makes sense. I knew about the 3dfx cards being AGP in form factor only . I wonder if XP will have these troubles on my other machine (#9 Revolution 4, Voodoo II). Yes, I apparently have a knack for picking products from companies that go out of business / get bought out .

Interesting. I've never seen this error on my machine. I'm having trouble telling by reading the thread... is it so far only NVidia boards that are having the problem? I've got a voodoo5, KT7 MB, AMD 750 processor and it seems rock steady. The only blue screens I've seen since installing have been from ejecting the CD too early after installing something (IE Please put CD-ROM vol # blahblahblah back in the drive)...

It doesn't install by default, but I just added it in.

NFS: PU and HS work fine for me. Hot Pursuit is suffering from keyboard lag at the moment.

Anyone else having keyboard lag problems? It's not the frame rate or the drawing speed, the game seems really smooth and runs fast. It's just like a delay between when I push a key and get a response. I find myself turning into walls, off the road, etc and redlining for a few seconds before the shift takes. Running it in any sort of compatibility mode caused horrible pausing in the game play and menus. (like half a second every 2 seconds). It doesn't SEEM to be a problem in Porsche Unleashed or High Stakes. I couldn't tell you offhand what mode PU is running in, but High Stakes and Hot Pursuit are running in D3D mode. Problem didn't exist in Win98SE which I had up until saturday when it spontaneously imploded. System: WinXP Home Edition Athlon 750 512MB RAM DPT 2144UW SCSI Host Adapter Plextor CD ROM (40max I think it is) Voodoo 5500 video board (I have a set of 3rdparty drivers from voodoofiles). Haven't had too much trouble installing things, though.