JediBaron

I don't know about anyone else with this game, but I haven't been really able to play it since I upgraded to Win2k that first time. In Win2k you could get the game started, but if you tried to use any DirectX 3D or sound it would just crash out to the desktop. Now without at least the Direct3d stuff, the graphics in the game were really bad, ie - all spells simply looked like little spit fireballs looked exactly the same as the magic missle, etc. So I didn't play it anymore and it remained my only game on the shelf that I couldn't use with Win2k. And 3do just said that 'Windows 2000 is not a gaming OS' line when I contacted them. Well recently I just installed Windows XP Pro on my system. So I decided to give the game another shot. Now when I started it up even in software mode it just crashed. Well I was like this will not do. So I was finally able to get it working again after running the WinXP Compatibility Wizard on it and setting it to either Win2k or 98. For some reason though it HAD to be done through the wizard, just setting the compatibiliey mode through the shortcut wouldn't work (weird). So it worked again, but only 100% in software mode . Well I was not ready to give up on it so quickly so I download the new Application Compatibility Toolkit 2.5 from Microsoft (It's made for XP and it will for Win2000 when sp3 is released so this may work for 2k systems later). Now i was trying verious things when i came across the Application Verifier 2.19 tool. This tool's job is to run a prog looking for certain things that you tell it to and log them so you can maybe figure out where your compatiblity issues are. I added the MM7Setup.exe to the list of apps and was checking a few items. And then I found out something weird . . . just by adding the app to the list it all of a sudden let MM7 run and not only run, but run in Direct3d mode!! And it is even working without any Compatibility Modes set in on MM7Setup.exe, just simply adding it to the verifier's list and not checking any options to log causes the game to run fine.

I got a 400 point 3dmark increase on my radeon 8500 with dx9 and the ver 3.0 drivers. I also got a small speed increase with my GF4 4200, both of them in Win2k. No issues or problems of any form with any games. As far as any increase will ever go with the GF4, I'm sure it won't amount to much - the GF4 was designed for DX7 after all. These articles with make believe problems come out EVERY SINGLE TIME anything of this nature is released. They said the same stupid stuff when they released IE5, Win2k, DX8, IE6, WinXP, Media Player 8 . . . and they will probably say the same thing about every single release that M$ will ever have in the future. These are the same idiots who first said that you would never be able to play a game on Win2k . . .

IBM has been having MASSIVE problems with those drives - you should dump it ASAP. I even read somewhere where a IBM support rep told someone that they should never run their 120 more than 8 hours a day - WTF?!?!

It is a security flaw that exists in the windows help system. Service Patch 1 fixes that problem, but if you wish to fix it yourself here's the instructions from my website: Quote: Basically the flaw exists as a specially formatted link. If someone formats a link in a certain way and then gets a Windows XP users to click on it sending it to them via email or even hiding it in a web page it will cause Windows XP to DELETE all the files in whatever directory they want! This is so easy to do that ANYONE who knows how to make a web page can do it. And it exists in ALL distributions of Windows XP! The fix thankfully is very easy to do. Simply open up Windows Explorer (in Start >> All Programs >> Accessories or hit the Windows Key + 'E'). Then hit the 'Search' button on the toolbar. Click on 'All files and folders' and in the top box type 'uplddrvinfo', in the 'Look in' box select 'My Computer', and then hit 'Search'. Now it will search you computer for a bit looking for the file. It should find the file and put it in the right window. (it will be under C:\WINDOWS\PCHEALTH\HELPCTR\System\DFS) Now simply right - click on the file name and hit 'Rename' then press the 'Arrow Right' key on your keyboard. Hit the 'Backspace' key 3 times and type in 'old' so that the filename will change from 'uplddrvinfo.htm' to 'uplddrvinfo.old' then hit the 'Enter' key. That's it - once this file has been renamed in your system you will be protected.

I just noticed today that I can no longer Switch Identities from within Outlook Express (6.00.2800.1106). I can change Identities only by either telling OE to open a different one by default or by making OE ask which profile to open every time. But if I try to switch identity normally while I'm in OE, it just closes and then opens to my default identity. I have 2 WinXP sp1 machines here and they are both exhibiting the same behavior. Is anyone else seeing this as well?

Just wondering if anyone has found a solution to XP's super high processor utilization via network connects? Play DVD movie = 22% processor utilization Play SOF2 in high quality = 70% processor utilization Download 10K file from internet = 100% processor utilization or someone grabs a file from me on network = 100% processor utilization I have no idea why this is in WinXP Pro as it was not this way in Win2K Pro. Maybe someone out there knows why this is?

Did you try my fix (like 10 posts down the page) to get it running in D3D?

No actually I just wanted to PLAY It's like coming back to an old addiction - I have put in like 15 hours in 2 days back into the game, LOL I'm hopelessly lost in primitive 3D world now

Yeah but this isn't a compatiblitly mode fix. I used the Application Verifier 2.19 tool to fix the program. I've been thinking about it all day and I think I know the reason that this worked: The App Verifier is a program that simply runs another program and then monitors outside function calls, etc. and logs them. So I'm supposing that the reason it fixed Direct3D support in MM7 is because in the process of filtering functions (even though I don't have it monitoring anything in specific) whatever illegal function call that it makes to DirectX is accidently squashed. And since the App Verifier tool ataches itself to the program file that your monitoring via a registry hook so that it can monitor it whenever it's run, all you have to do is set it in there once, tell it to log nothing and never mess with it again (as long as the Application Compatibility Toolkit stays installed of course ) This may actually turn out to be a new way to get other programs to work also, not just MM7.

The problem does not exist in any other operating system then Win2k. So importing that registry key into WinXP's registry will probably not do anything. More than likely it will just be ignored.

Have you run the AMD/AGP patch for Win2k? http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/largePageMinimum.reg Try that and then reboot.

Yep you've run into the SB Live flaw It's a major hardware problem that exists in about 25% of all Live cards. The major symptoms are sound distortions, AGP bus data corruption, and random hard drive corruption. Some people have been able to fix the problem somewhat with the Latency Patch. But if that doesn't work your only solution is to remove the Live card and reinstall Windows without it plugged in. It messes up the m/b's and Windows' PNP so that even replacing the sound card with a different one will not normally fix your problems. Reinstalling Windows and forcing it to re-init the PNP system on the m/b and it windows seems to be the only fix for it BTW - According to Creative this problem doesn't and hasn't ever existed, so I guess we're not really having this conversation.

Norton 2002 costs more?? what?? $8 a disk for a year's subscription is breaking my bank for sure

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

Has anyone been able to get D3D acceleration to work in this game under Win2k and an Nvidia card? I wrote 3DO and this was their response: Sorry it took a little while, but now that I've had the chance to do some testing on this I can see that it seems to be a Windows 2000 issue. More specifically, for some reason MM7 does not seem to like the D3D drivers for Nvida cards -- I tested it with a TNT2 on 2 different Win2000 systems and got crashed to the desktop every time in D3D mode, on current Nvidia drivers. Since the game wasn't originally tested or programmed for Windows 2000, there's not much we can do about this issue. Although Windows 2000 isn't officially supported here I've tried to determine if it was a know hardware issue (unrelated to the operating system) to see if there was some other way to resolve the problem, but there doesn't seem to be anything. I apologize for the inconvenience, but that seeems to be the answer. I can't belive that this is the answer - it works with other cards, but not Nvidia, the most common 3D card out there!?!? It wouldn't be such a prob but the crappy 2D engine in the game cuts out a bunch of the effects. All the spell effect are the first casualty. Not like today's computers don't have enough power to do all those effects using 2D accelerations, but 3DO didn't see it that way for some stupid reason!

Yepper, Run your UT in OpenGL with the patched OpenGL fix and it will run LOADS better. If you need the fix and it's instructions just email me and I'll send them to you.

First make sure that you actually have the 1370 chip by opening up your machine and looking at the card. Then get the Win2k driver here: http://www.creativehelp.com/files/download.asp?OS=Win2k&prod=sb_ensq Should do you better than the default drivers. Make sure to download the Win2k driver file after you get the install program. Creative's got really stupid and complex install instructions so be carefull Ps - If you've installed any of the Creative junk that came on the cd you'll probably want to remove before you install the drivers from the site. [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 14 February 2001).]

Some people have said they got it fixed by using the Creative Liveware 3 and DirectX 8. They went into the diagnostic program (Start >> Run... >> dxdiag) and set the sound acceleration all the way up.

Mine doesn't do that when I kick up to 32bit color. I'm using an ASUS6600 (Geforce 256) w/ 6.62 certified drivers

No way, guys! If your's going to go for a kick @ss soundcard go for the Acoustic Edge card. It rocks and has excellent out-of-the-box Win2k drivers. It's a little bit slower than the Live card (8% processor usage compaired to 5%), but is not plagued by all of Creative's massive problems. It also has EAX 1.0 & 2.0 and A3D 1.0 (no A3D 2.0, but that may change with later drivers. I personally have my doubts because Creative will more than likely drop all developement support for it now that they own A3D) It even comes in 3 versions: The 2 speaker output one is $50 the 4.1 version is $75 and the 5.1 version is $100.

I just got myself one of those 7700 Geforce2 GTS's and spent like 2 hours tinkering with the glasses to get them to work right. Thought I could try saving someone else the time. The first thing I found is that you need to have a monitor that can do at least 1280x960 if you want to get any OpenGl games to run in 3D. If you don't set your OpenGl game to use at least 1280x960, the sterioscopic vision won't even turn on. After I grabbed another monitor, I tried using it. I kept getting this really bad distortion line in the moving up and down the screen. Thinking that maybe my card couldn't handle the 120Hz refresh rate, I tried lowering it. That's when I found out that any settings below 120 cause the glasses not to blink at all. Not to mention it cut off part of the screen when you switched to sterioscopic mode. - Doh! But I wasn't ready to give up so easily . I started tweeking and tweeking. First thing that actually helped a little was setting the D3D advanced settings to not sync the frames. Now I don't think I have to tell anyone that uses Nvidia cards that you should set the Sync to 'Off by default' under the OpenGl settings also, but I'll mention it just in case. Still, I had distortions. Then I found the setting that fixed the sterioscopic vision in both D3D and OpenGl. Under the OpenGl tab there is an obscure setting that changes the PCI texture size. I set this from the default 5 to the max of 16. Then BLAM!, all sterioscopic vision worked perfect. Here's the system specs that I got it to work on: Operating System: Windows 2000 Pro sp1 (running fully PNP w/ ACPI) Processor: AMD K7 T-Bird 900 w/ 256 Megs PC133 Motherboard: Abit KT7-Raid (Bios WZ01) w/ the Via 4 in 1 (425), Abit Raid drivers beta 3 Hard Drive: 2 X Maxtor 30gig UDMA 100 (striped raid) Video: Asus 7700 32 meg (Asus Win2k drivers v5.33) Sound: SB Live 5.1 with remote package Modem: USR 56K PCI (2977 hardware model ) Misc: IDE DVD drive and CD Writer, Intellimouse w/ intellipoint 3.2 (ver. 3.20.0.484) DirectX: 8.0 (4.08.00.0400) One final note: These video drivers won't work with PowerDVD 3.0, but they do work with PowerDVD 2.55 which is what came with the card (under Asus's name of course ) L8r

'SB Live or Die at Random' strikes again Are you running DirectX 8 and the official Liveware 3? If you are then try this: Run 'dxdiag' from the run option in your start menu. Then under the 'Sound' tab, turn your hardware acceleration level all the way up.

The problem is probably in your old 3 Gig (3gigs !?!?!?!?!?!?!?!) hard drive. It is probably not fully ATA multidrive compliant. Basically in a master/slave setup, the master hd controls the slave. So if your old drive acts like a normal ATA, but isn't, it might tell Win2k that it's slave drive is only 8gigs not 30. 8 Gigs was the max size that older harddrive controllers were built to handle. To tell you the truth, the setup that you have listed at your page is very poorly configured. If I wanted to set up a comparable system to do everything you're doing, I would only have 2 drives. 4 drives would hurt performance too much for my liking and it would cost too much. It would be cheaper and faster to have 2 drives instead of this miss-matched piece of hardware you have set up.

Another good way to delete them in win98 and better is to use Disk Cleanup. Open up My Computer, right-click on your hard drive and hit Properties. Then there's a button called 'Disk Cleanup . . .' The nice thing about that is that it can delete the temp files in all profiles in Win2k (***uming your admin, of course) [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 02 December 2000).]

No, no! The problem is caused by Media Player 7. You must remove the CD Writer component in the setup, then your drives will come back just fine.