[postul8or]

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.

[ConQueso]

Check this out. Also, maybe consider getting a new graphics card if you want to play new games... 3dfx is no more, and neither is any (official) driver support.

[postul8or]

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

[ConQueso]

Did you read the entire FAQ? One of the suggestions in it is to search the forums to see if someone else has had the same problem.

[thatsteveguy]

I wouldn't compare win me to 2000 as they are completely different OS's that share little with each other. so the fact something might run will on ME is no indication it will run under 2k.
but try a search of the forums as I am sure someone else has had this problem,
but you definately want to look for a new video card.
S

[pmistry]

NFS: PU has been discussed alot here. There are several options you have, search the boards and you'll find some answers. Check the NTCompatible game list as well.

For me personally, deleting gimme.dll fixes the problem. Others say adjusting the Swap file if you have more than 256 megs of RAM.

You should get a new video card, even if you don't play a lot of games. You can get a low cost GeForce2MX, GeForce4MX, or Radeon 7500 for dirt cheap prices and acceptable performance which would be better than your Voodoo.

[postul8or]

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...

[postul8or]

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

[ConQueso]

Quote:

Also, why is everyone assuming it is the video component that is causing the problem...

It's not so much that I'm assuming it is the sole problem, it's more that I know it is just going to cause compatibility problems more and more as more new games get released. I had the same card, and finally caved in and got a new mobo and an nvidia card. Now the V3 2000 is in a friends Win95 P2 266MHz system, and pushing UT and other (pre-DirectX 8) games quite well. I've advised him not to bother with any DX8 games (and why would he, he's only running a 266).

[pmistry]

Glad to help.

As for the video, it was just a suggestion, personally, I am not a hardcore fan of Nvidia or ATI, I try all the companies.

[postul8or]

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]

I completely understand your stance. In fact I used to buy ATI cards all the time, but their driver support sucked, so I dumped them. However this week I intend to pick up an 8500 Radeon, cuz I think ATI has managed to do a lot better now with drivers and I am going to give them a chance again. The GeForce2MX I was using was running just fine, its just too slow for me now.

[JediBaron]

Don't get the Radeon 8500 dude it sux bad
first off - their drivers have absolutely no support for multi-monitor at all, one of my main reasons for getting my Radeon. all the drivers let u do is mirror monitors and span the monitors - it's stupid beyond belief.
Also it has a lot of stupid res's that noone ever uses. wtf is 704X480 anyway????
and on top of that - there are many driver issues
and for Win2k or XP the only program that I could get to set the refresh rates higher than 60 in games is refreshlock which took about 2 days to find. Radeon Tweak seems to work ok, but only if you don't have any other video cards in (like I was forced to do to get multi-monitor support again). But the drivers even mess up when you just have another video card in too - they think that the other monitor is plugged into their card. All in all it's all ****ed up

[postul8or]

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?