scenarios fail to start?

[unmerged(5171)]

The game installed and started up rather nicely on my computer, which barely fulfills the minimum hardware requirements, but when I try to start a scenario (any scenario) the game crashes instantly and returns to desktop, without any error messages.

The version seems to be 1.07 (english language), and as for hardware, I have...

200Mhz Cyrix
64MB
Elderly 2mb video card

What should I do? I'm already downloading the 1.09 upgrade.

-Joonas

 

[unmerged(5171)]

Right, I was a bit hasty not reading the list of possible remedies before posting. Now I have applied them (defrag, upgrade, etc.) and they did have a noticeable effect: now I get a brief flash of an error message before the game crashes on the desktop when I try to load scenarios:

Critical error!
Fatal error: could not initialize Video for Fmv!
Do you still want to continue?
and the usual Abort, Retry, Fail.

When I choose one of the options, the game proceeds to crash.

Now what? Could it be that my video card isn't up to this game after all? Or is it the memory? Or something that can be fixed without painful hardware upgrades? Please help, since I'm really itching to play this game...

-Joonas

 

[unmerged(1095)]

A Cyrix 200 is equivalent to a Pentium 166. The game requires a pentium 200. However I dont believe that is causing the crash.
I reckon it is your video card. The CD installed DirectX 7 (as required by the game) but if your card is that old I doubt that your drivers are DirectX 7 compatible. You can check this by going to the "DirectX" folder on your HDD and running the file "DxDiag".

2 choices:-

Search for and download the newest Graphic Card drivers
or
go to www.scitechsoft.com and download the trial version of their Display Doctor. This is quite a good program and it uses its own generic drivers. (My daughter uses it on *her* ancient Cyrix P200!)

The later may be your best bet. Try it out and see if there is any difference.

In the long run though your system is really no longer powerful enough for todays game and you should consider getting a new one!

Let me know what happens.....