Tides of War

This is mind blowing. I've been playing E:RT for some time (yrs?) with the same config with no trouble (after an initial period of perplexity). Lately, the game loads, I get to the chosen screen, the sound and picture, stops and starts, sputters and eventually freezes stiff! I have to reset the entire comp each time. No other game does this.

I recently bought a brand new copy of the game and it still happens. How could what worked before suddenly not work now?! Admittedly, I have dwnloaded other games, demos, etc. which may have had an adverse effect, but why on this game and not the thousand other games on my comp?

I re-dwnload the graphic driver (It's still the same driver--same date). I unistalled E:RT and re-installed. (Is it possible for a game to develope a tolerance for a particular driver?) I fooled around with the sound hardware accelarator, (since the loud, sharp, scratchy, sound seems a part of this problem), with no luck.

Is it possible my ancient, corrupted dial-up modem has anything to do with this? Recently I found out the modem was interferring with me receiving calls--all of a sudden. How? I dunno, but unhooking the line from the modem allowed me to get calls again. Again, this happened after working fine for the last two years.

Below are my stats. I'd truly appreciate any input.

WIN XP

AMD Athlon XP 1800+

RADEON 8500

1.6 GHz

640 MB RAM

C 20 GB

D 40 GB

do you have any antivirus, spyware, trojan software loaded while playing E:RT ?

make sure you do have the latest audio, video and chipset drivers installed.

One thing is different, I'm running AVG free. I used to run Norton, I think. Anyhow, I uninstalled it, re-ran E:RT sans AVG...same thing. Dam! Other than enjoying arguably the best dam sea-going lick on my comp, I'm just frustrated I can't figure out what it is!

I'm going to run a virus scan (other than AVG), (but why would a virus only effect this, my favorite game..is that what they call a smart virus?!)

I dunno. I got the latest aud driver, vid driver, by chipset, you mean what? as you're reading this I will have checked into that, too.

When E:RT froze a moment ago, I removed the disk (I know, I know) to see what would happen. The screen remained frozen a minute then I got the blue screen: process_has_locked_pages. Don't know if that is a result of my removing the disk, or if in fact that is what's going on.

Have you ever heard of anything like this happening before? I'm not a newbie, I've been around the bush, so to speak, gaming-wise, have all sorts of weird things happen (and resolved, I might add) but

this puppy's got me stymied!

The screen just sits there...I've trived replacing CD/ROM's thinking maybe it's not running fast enough...that's not it (I've tried five so far) and again, the larger question, why was it running sucessfully for years with the same basic hook-up??? Owwwwww!

The chipset driver is the driver for your motherboards chipset, its either a VIA, NFORCE or INTEL chipset. You can see which you have in the manual of the board.

I have not heard or experienced this behavior myself, have you tried to remove the starforce driver and install it again and/or simply get the latest driver from starforce's website ?

I have VIA, Jesper. But before that, I think I may have a clue to what's going on. Firstly, other games are starting to act weird, freezing, hanging, etc. Whatever this is, it is affecting the display, graphic, redering aspects of gaming. The culprit may be DirectX. Tell me what you think:

I get this message when I click the display tab in DirectX.

Problems were found in the system registry. Details are available in the saved text file. You should reinstall DirectX to get the lates version.

Which is exactly what I did. I un-installed DirectX (found a DirX freeware delete util). Cleaned the Reg. Then re-installed the latest version of DirectX. I still got that error mess. So now I'm going to consult greater minds them myself who know about such things and see what's going on.

But I think it probably a good thing to get Starforce's latest driver (never occured to me), once I've settled the major problem. I will keep y'all posted. Thanks so much.

if you want, you can email me that txt file and I shall have a look

Appreciate it, but check this:

i had the same problem. The cause was the video card overheated too much to where the video card just didn't want to work properly, even idling in Windows. It's a hardware fault and you will need to replace it.

I received this in reply at another forum. This was my reply:

I'll be darn! That's the only thing that makes sense! I mean, I've played Enigma forever, with nary a bump...thanks so much. What's puzzling, is that I remove the sides to my comp, so it's weird it would overheat. I mean, I know that it can still get hot, after all, I probably turn it off and on more than average (I'm always toolin' around inside for one reason or another), but tell me: would that, constant re-booting be a contributing factor in it overheating? Is there a way in the BIOS I can gauge the temp to at least monitor it in future? Wow! this is mind blowin'. And further, does the display adapter and the CPU heat up to the same degree? Or being two entirely different devices, have different heat and cold tolerances?

I'd appreciate your response to my reply, Jes-

Modern video-cards gets much more warm than CPUs, that is pretty normal, and whilst they don't always come with a pre-mounted fan, such one can be bought separately, there is no way to adjust nor monitor the temps from the BIOS, however other accessories for case-modding can be bought that allows fan control and temp monitoring.

Taking the side(s) of the case is a bad idea as it does not help the cooling of the parts inside, you have to create a proper airflow, with some fans, I have 2x80mm in the front which are blowing in air, 2x80mm on the backside to blow it out and 1x80mm in the top, to take out the heat from my DVD?RW and the remains from the PSU that its own 90mm fan doesn't catch, and I keep my case-sides on to control the flow of ventilation air.

I am not sure my first attempt to fix it would be replacing the card, but I would add a 40mm fan to its heatzink, and make sure my case was properly vented.a 40mm fan costs around USD $2.

It would also help if you move all your PCI cards as far away from the AGP card (video-card) (assuming that you have any other expansion cards close to the AGP card which may prevent the video-card from having the chance to push the heat from it self far away enough so it doesn't reuse the heat to cool down.

What a wealth of info there! Man, I thank you. Let me supply you with an update.

I remove the vid card preparatory to exchanging it for one from an old comp (question: I have a RADEON

9000 64 RAM; does that mean it is 'better' than the present 8500 64 RAM?).

Now this is proceeding under the assumption that the present one (the 8500) is 'fried.'

When I removed it, I'm embarassed to say - bet you're not surprised - the thing was as

thick with dust and grit as the floor under a sofa --I cleaned it up, thing looked almost brand new!

I decided to put it back, now that it had been cleaned. Not suprisingly, the games ran smooth as silk except - you got it! - ERT. It ran somewhat smoother, tho' it was still far from playable (same jerky frame rate, sputtering and cracking sound)....Now either the card is damaged,

or something elese I'm overlooking. (More that likely it's the card, right?) As I say, ERT ran sweet 'till just a while ago.

D' ya think if I dust out the rest of unit, the CPU fan, etc., I may get a performance hit? (I'm only half-kidding.)

Get back to ya...

In response to the RADEON question:

At first glance I would say yes, but its hard to tell for sure with all the cards that are out, for instance a GForce 5200 Ultra is faster than a GForce 5600 (as long as it doesn't have the U, XT, GT, TC extension), but generally the higher the number is the better the card is.

Always make sure that your heatsinks and fans stays clear of dust, not only does that improve performance but also keeps the fans to a noise minimum, plus the things they are supposed to keep "cold" are a lot better of getting rid of the heat. its the same when you are in bed, sweating like a pig, and someone puts a woolen blanket over you, it only makes you sweat even more

As for getting E:RT to run smoother, your only solution is probably to buy a videocard with more ram, 128MB or 256MB they are extremely cheap and I am surprised that a gamer like you only has 64MB on yours