Video erorrs?

[Rowain]

I've been looking over the forums for awhile but can't seem to find a working solution.

I downloaded the game off Paradox on Demand and installed the 1.1 patch. However, the problem has been present since I installed, and the patch didn't help.

Basically, when I start the game it starts to play the logo video fine. if I let it goes, it plays the little thing about war needed for peace. But after this, the screen goes dark for about 20 seconds and then it tells me "Fatal error! unable to initialize video". Hitting abort kicks me out of game obviously, and retry and ignore have the same result: it goes black again for about 15-20 seconds and then exits and gives me a windows error.

I'm running Windows XP, and have a x800 video card. I tried renaming the avi folder to AVI_back and it didn't help - instead of showing the logo video it just went black and gave me the fatal error again.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated at this point.

 

[jpd]

Try setting your desktop to the same resolution as the game itself uses, ie. 1024x768, 16 bits color depth.

If that does not work, please run dxdiag, and post the resulting diagnostic text file verbatim (yes, it's long but we need to look at all of it) in this thread.

 

[Rowain]

That worked. Thanks. Is there any workaround though? I'd hate to have to keep setting my resolution this low whenever I want to play!

 

[Castellon]

Rename the AVI folder to AVI_back, this will disable the BInk player and stop the OPening movies from playing. Skipping this step may help.

 

[Rowain]

Rename the AVI folder to AVI_back, this will disable the BInk player and stop the OPening movies from playing. Skipping this step may help.

I tried renaming the avi folder to AVI_back and it didn't help - instead of showing the logo video it just went black and gave me the fatal error again.

Thanks for the help but I already tried this.

Edit: for unfathomable reasons, I can now run the game fine with a desktop resolution of 1280x1024. The game switches into 1024x768 just fine on its own.

 

[jpd]

I do not exclude the possibility that DirectX had to see that resolution in operation once (as a desktop resolution), before somehow knowing how to set it up properly.