My wife's been looking forward to Civ4 since it was announced, just got
a copy and it won't run on her machine. Does anyone have a
spare, wprking, PC AGP video card with hardware T&L? Anything with an
ATI 7500 or better, or GeForce2 or better, should work.
(Yes, I'm also checking eBay. She's not willing to spend the money for
a new card.)

Err. Just to warn you, I had a GF3TI200, and Civ4 was totally unplayable. I
had to boost all the way to a GF6200.
Nick
Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 07:06:41PM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
My wife's been looking forward to Civ4 since it was announced, just got
a copy and it won't run on her machine. Does anyone have a
spare, wprking, PC AGP video card with hardware T&L? Anything with an
ATI 7500 or better, or GeForce2 or better, should work.

(Yes, I'm also checking eBay. She's not willing to spend the money for
a new card.)

Nick B. wrote:
Err. Just to warn you, I had a GF3TI200, and Civ4 was totally unplayable. I
had to boost all the way to a GF6200.
Nick
Erk. *Civ4* is that GPU-hungry?!?

Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 08:54:54AM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
Because of this, I'll probably never take the chance on buying another
UbiSoft game. There's also a good chance I won't buy Halo 2 when it
comes out, despite how much I liked Halo, because it was such a bloody
battle getting Halo to work.

I've had similar problems with other games. Since they require the original
CD to be in the drive when they start, the CD eventualy becomes so damaged
(by a 10 year old) from taking it out, putting it away in those horrible
vertical stack boxes and putting it back in that you can no longer install
it from the CDs.

This does not sound like a problem until you have a hard drive crash,
or an "oops, I deleted the wrong file". :-) The first time it happened,
I had to find a bootleg on the internet to re-install the game, the second
I just copied it with clone-cd before my son installed it.

You can install from the copies, but not run the game. This does not
bother me as the game will run with a CD that is damaged in the middle
and will no longer install.

What really caused a problem was an older game, sold here as a re-issue
in a Hebrew box, with a Hebrew instruction pamphlet that would not work if
you had a CD or DVD burner. The original disk had to be in a read only
drive. Luckliy Clone-CD had a way of getting around it, because how do you
explain to a 10 year old that he just spent two month's allowance on a game
that won't run on his computer.

Geoff.

Gary Goddard wrote:
Doom3 was the same on my pc so i took it back and got a refund!!

Yet quake 4 by the same people, same protection runs fine!

I haven't tried Quake 4. Does it actually have a single-player game?

I never bought Doom 3 in the end because, despite all the wonderful
graphics it promised, just about everything I read about it everywhere
indicates that you spend about 80% of the game stumbling around in pitch
darkness equipped with weapons, a flashlight, and apparently not the
wits to duct-tape the latter to the former so you can use both at once.

I hated the parts of DM.
I hated the parts of DM 2.
I hated the parts of Quake.
I hated the parts of Quake 2.
I hated the parts of Half Life.

So why on earth, or in Hell, would I buy a game that by all accounts is
*almost entirely* composed of stumbling around in pitch darkness?

I suppose it makes it a lot easier to render a scene, though, if all you
can actually see of most of it is vague shadows most of the time.

As a side note, I looked at Quake 4 the other day when I was shopping
for Civ4 for my wife, and thought, "Yawn, more Stroggs." I don't know
what made iD switch from the nether horrors of Quake to the cyborg
Stroggs of Quake 2. The original Quake was so wonderfully atmospheric,
everything was pervaded with an air of imminent ethereal menace and
they've never managed to recapture it since. (And it was immensely
gratifying to kite a Shambler around and use it as an anti-Vore weapon.)

Phil Stracchino <phil.stracchino (AT) speakeasy (DOT) netwrote:
[]
It won't play at all on my Athlon64-system, apparently because
SafeDisc4 is in denial about the existence of an optical drive in my
system. It's a perfectly good NEC ND-3520AW, but no
SafeDisc4-protected game will play on it.

Hmm, at least some protection schemes will fail safe and let you play
if the drive can't be accessed. Copied Codemasters games will
allegedly play fine on my SCSI DVD-RW drive (although I haven't tested
this.)

I'd like to go kick these copy-protection idiots in the nuts; not
only are they preventing legitimate buyers from playing their games,
they're *forcing people* to use hacks and cracks and pirated
versions, and they're too damn stupid to see it.

I can't be bothered with that faff, so I don't tend to bother with
games, pirate or not. As it happens, the only PC game I've bought this
decade is one that I confirmed beforehand was not copy-protected. It
also helped that it's also for SX so runs adequately on my PowerBook.

Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 08:35:43AM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:

(moving to geeks)

It won't play at all on my Athlon64-system, apparently because SafeDisc4
is in denial about the existence of an optical drive in my system. It's
a perfectly good NEC ND-3520AW, but no SafeDisc4-protected game will
play on it. I'd like to go kick these copy-protection idiots in the
nuts; not only are they preventing legitimate buyers from playing their
games, they're *forcing people* to use hacks and cracks and pirated
versions, and they're too damn stupid to see it.

That's what killed the Amiga IMH The games were great, but they were
so heavily compressed that it took forever to load them from a floppy.
, "The Killing Game Show" by Psygnosis was a great game, but it took
10 minutes to load.

It was also so heavily copy protected that the floppies went bad after
playing it a few times, so you HAD to make "backup" copies or loose your
investment ($50).

I just decided that if I had to pirate the game, or make "nibbled" copies
of it just to play it, it was not worthy of my money. So I stopped buying
their games for both the Amiga and PC.

What totaly killed it for me was the day I got a hard disk for my
Amiga 2000. I could load regular programs "instantly", but to load the
games I had payed big bucks for, I had to find pirated versions without
the copy protection. I then decided it was not work it to me at all

Geoff.

Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 01:57:18PM +0000, Gary Goddard wrote:
Doom3 was the same on my pc so i took it back and got a refund!!

That only works so far, as most places here will not refund a game
that has been opened, no matter why. They will only give you a new
copy of the same game.

I have seen complaints of retailers "profiling" customers in the U.S.
and refusing returns from people with "too many".

Geoff.

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 @ 16:14 +0200, Geoffrey S. Mendelson said:

That only works so far, as most places here will not refund a game
that has been opened, no matter why. They will only give you a new
copy of the same game.

I have seen complaints of retailers "profiling" customers in the U.S.
and refusing returns from people with "too many".

Dilbert two Sunday's ago covered this, sort of. Dilbert's mom goes in to
return a scarf, and the clerk says she's on the bad customer list, and
she's bought and returned the same scarf 17 times. "Company policy says
I have to harvest your organs and sell them on eBay."

It was a good poke at both customer and store abuses.

Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
What totaly killed it for me was the day I got a hard disk for my
Amiga 2000. I could load regular programs "instantly", but to load the
games I had payed big bucks for, I had to find pirated versions without
the copy protection. I then decided it was not work it to me at all

*nod*

Personally, I love ubisoft's Ghost Recon. But, the video card I
purchased for my new gamebox back in February (after UPS destroyed the
old one) came with two Ubisoft games bundled, Prince of Persia: Warrior
Within and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. I was eventually able to
get Prince of Persia working after Ubisoft sent me a no-CD patch, but,
well, frankly, the game sucked goat balls. It turned out to be a
game-console arcade game.
Splinter Cell, on the other hand, I actually wanted to play, but never
successfully got it working even with Ubisoft's help.

Because of this, I'll probably never take the chance on buying another
UbiSoft game. There's also a good chance I won't buy Halo 2 when it
comes out, despite how much I liked Halo, because it was such a bloody
battle getting Halo to work.

11/28/05, Phil Stracchino <phil.stracchino (AT) speakeasy (DOT) netwrote:

<snip>

I never bought Doom 3 in the end because, despite all the wonderful
graphics it promised, just about everything I read about it everywhere
indicates that you spend about 80% of the game stumbling around in pitch
darkness equipped with weapons, a flashlight, and apparently not the
wits to duct-tape the latter to the former so you can use both at once.

<snip>

The original Quake was so wonderfully atmospheric,
everything was pervaded with an air of imminent ethereal menace and
they've never managed to recapture it since. (And it was immensely
gratifying to kite a Shambler around and use it as an anti-Vore weapon.)
--

Phil Stracchino wrote:
There's also a good chance I won't buy Halo 2 when it comes out,
despite how much I liked Halo, because it was such a bloody battle
getting Halo to work.

And people wonder why I have lost interest in PC games. I want to
*play* them, not take on a full-time job keeping track of what I need to
to to make them work!

All I can say is

Halo (both of 'em) Just Worked in my Xbox and will Just Work when I get
my Xbox 360 ;)

Phil Brutsche wrote:
And people wonder why I have lost interest in PC games. I want to
*play* them, not take on a full-time job keeping track of what I need to
to to make them work!

All I can say is

Halo (both of 'em) Just Worked in my Xbox and will Just Work when I get
my Xbox 360 ;)

Provided your XBox 360 doesn't Just Burn Up. ;) Judging by what I'm
hearing, people are returning them in droves because they're overheating
and failing.

Personally, I'll probably never buy a game console, partly because I
don't want to be tied into any single manufacturer's games, partly
because I don't see the need for a piece of dedicated hardware to do
what my PC can do (and probably do better most of the time), and partly
because I hate and detest game-console controllers.

Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Phil Brutsche wrote:
And people wonder why I have lost interest in PC games. I want to
*play* them, not take on a full-time job keeping track of what I need to
to to make them work!

This is why I loved S/2 so much back when I played a lot of games. Rather
than trial-and-error playing with memory managers, device drivers, multiple
config.sys files, etc, I could just launch a DS session with the device drivers
loaded AND the full 640k of conventional memory free and play any game I wanted. I
got DS games to work in S/2 that I could never get running in DS. The
funniest part was to show people Wing Commander and X-wing running at the same
time in DS windows and watch their heads explode.
-DanD

Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 09:13:42AM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
I never bought Doom 3 in the end because, despite all the wonderful
graphics it promised, just about everything I read about it everywhere
indicates that you spend about 80% of the game stumbling around in pitch
darkness equipped with weapons, a flashlight, and apparently not the
wits to duct-tape the latter to the former so you can use both at once.

I might pick up Doom 3 now that it's $20.

Games I've bought lately:

FEAR (excellent, if you have a decent video card)
Far Cry ($20, and one of the best games I've played lately)
Serious Sam Gold collection (old, but fun)
Half-Life 2 (I still need to play it all the way through)
BF1942 (haven't installed it yet, and I bought it a year ago)

Bill

Chad McAuley wrote:
11/28/05, Phil Stracchino <phil.stracchino (AT) speakeasy (DOT) netwrote:
>>The original Quake was so wonderfully atmospheric,
>>everything was pervaded with an air of imminent ethereal menace and
>>they've never managed to recapture it since. (And it was immensely
>>gratifying to kite a Shambler around and use it as an anti-Vore weapon.)

The site for it seems to be down, but someone made a mod that did just that,
at least with the machine gun and shotgun.

Yeah, I've heard there's some tactical-light mods out there. I figured
it probably wouldn't be too long.

Sometimes I don't mind the dark
atmosphere of Doom 3, because if I turn all the lights off and put my
headphones on I get really immersed and on edge, always wondering what's
going to jump out at me from the darkness next.

, sure, I think the gloom has its place. just not ALL THE TIME.

But after a while it does
get very tedious. And I agree with you 100% that the original Quake had an
awesome atmosphere that they've yet to come close to recapturing. Every
time a new QuakeC mod/partial conversion came out I wanted to play with, I'd
load up one of the four episodes and play my way through it to check out the
new goodies the mod added. I knew every level forwards and backwards and
yet I never got tired of it.

I never got around to checking out the finished version of the Aliens
TC. I have both of the expansions to Quake, but for some reason I can't
get either of them to work on Windows 2000. I had a series of levels
I'd designed for Doom!, but never got around to doing any levels for
Quake because when Quake was New And Hot, the machine I had wasn't fast
enough to run it decently.

Also, back to the original subject of this thread, I just recently upgraded
to a 6600GT from my Radeon 8500LE, so now the Radeon is just sitting
around. If you're interested contact me off-list and we'll hammer out the
details.

Bill already offered us a GeForce 5200, thanks. I have a 6600 in my
gamebox which I'd like to upgrade to a pair of 6800s or 7800s (it's an
SLI-capable PCI-Express machine) when we can afford it, but the money
just isn't there right now.

Bill Bradford wrote:
I might pick up Doom 3 now that it's $20.

True, there's that.

Games I've bought lately:

FEAR (excellent, if you have a decent video card)

I haven't heard of it.

Far Cry ($20, and one of the best games I've played lately)

Excellent game, except I've never been able to get past the entry hall
in the volcano. I like how sniper-friendly it is, and I like the fact
that you're limited to four weapons at a time (though Halo and Ghost
Recon have an even more realistic two-weapon limit I personally
think a knife should be a "free slot", but neither Halo nor GR offers
one anyway).

Serious Sam Gold collection (old, but fun)

Never played it.

Half-Life 2 (I still need to play it all the way through)

HL2 rocks the steering on the airboat is terrible, but I can live
with that. What I DN'T like is what I've come to realize is Valve's
*habit* of snatching your final victory away at the last second. Half
Life did it, and Half Life 2 did it. If I've just beat the game, let me
WIN, don't play "K, so you just won, now LEARN HW HELPLESS YU ARE
BEFRE US, SUCKAH!"

I probably won't buy another Valve game because of it, much though I
liked Half Life. (And, heretical though this may be to judge by a lot
of the reviews, I LIKED the Xen sections.)

BF1942 (haven't installed it yet, and I bought it a year ago)

Never bought it.

Steve Haavik wrote:
I've been playing it on a Radeon 9800 (I think it's the 128 meg version)
without any trouble. It's in an Athalon-64 system with 512 megs of ram.

The forums at had
some good info about the technical issues with the game. They even have a
list of the supported cards here.

Thanks, useful info.
It won't play at all on my Athlon64-system, apparently because SafeDisc4
is in denial about the existence of an optical drive in my system. It's
a perfectly good NEC ND-3520AW, but no SafeDisc4-protected game will
play on it. I'd like to go kick these copy-protection idiots in the
nuts; not only are they preventing legitimate buyers from playing their
games, they're *forcing people* to use hacks and cracks and pirated
versions, and they're too damn stupid to see it.

Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 08:54:54AM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>>Because of this, I'll probably never take the chance on buying another
>>UbiSoft game. There's also a good chance I won't buy Halo 2 when it
>>comes out, despite how much I liked Halo, because it was such a bloody
>>battle getting Halo to work.

I've had similar problems with other games. Since they require the original
CD to be in the drive when they start, the CD eventualy becomes so damaged
(by a 10 year old) from taking it out, putting it away in those horrible
vertical stack boxes and putting it back in that you can no longer install
it from the CDs.

This is why we don't use the original CDs; we use VirtualCD to create CD
images, and install from those. Most games run quite happily using just
the CD image. A few (Ghost Recon, Diablo II, Civ3, for example) make it
necessary to use a No-CD patch.

What really caused a problem was an older game, sold here as a re-issue
in a Hebrew box, with a Hebrew instruction pamphlet that would not work if
you had a CD or DVD burner. The original disk had to be in a read only
drive. Luckliy Clone-CD had a way of getting around it, because how do you
explain to a 10 year old that he just spent two month's allowance on a game
that won't run on his computer.

I continue to wonder at the stupidity of these game companies who, in
their continuing efforts to stop people from using hacked or pirated
copies of their games, force people to use hacked or pirated copies of
their games.

Face it, you entertainment industry idiots, you're not losing half as
much sales as you think you are; the people who will only use pirated
CDs and games WEREN'T GING T BUY YUR GAME R MUSIC CD ANYWAY if they
couldn't get it for free. Maybe if you counted actual pirate copies in
circulation, instead of saying, "Well, we think this CD/game SHULD sell
four billion copies, any less is BVIUSLY the result of piracy", you
might have a more realistic picture, and you might not piss off as many
customers. Macromedia is telling you scare stories to make you buy
their lame product.

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 @ 13:32 -0500, Phil Stracchino said:

, sure, I think the gloom has its place. just not ALL THE TIME.

Also, how come the graphics still have not shown what everyone really
wants to see:

DESTRUCTABLE ENVIRNMENT

Hello? Game companies? I *need* to blow stuff up. No more of this
bullets hitting things and making little flashes in GI-Joe style.

The hell with pretty graphics, I want to see things that look *REAL* for
a change.

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 @ 10:09 -0600, Phil Brutsche said:

Phil Stracchino wrote:
There's also a good chance I won't buy Halo 2 when it comes out,
despite how much I liked Halo, because it was such a bloody battle
getting Halo to work.

And people wonder why I have lost interest in PC games. I want to
*play* them, not take on a full-time job keeping track of what I need to
to to make them work!

All I can say is

Halo (both of 'em) Just Worked in my Xbox and will Just Work when I get
my Xbox 360 ;)

I've never been much of a console fan.

I hate the limits of the controller, and don't like closed systems.

I like how PC games get extensively modded too, and certain kinds of
games either suck on console, or will simply never be written for them.

In my ideal works I have a gaming PC and a good console so I don't have
to use an important machine for games.

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 @ 09:13 -0500, Phil Stracchino said:

Gary Goddard wrote:
Doom3 was the same on my pc so i took it back and got a refund!!

Yet quake 4 by the same people, same protection runs fine!

I haven't tried Quake 4. Does it actually have a single-player game?

Yes, but I thought it sucked.

In fact, I didn't like the graphics in either Doom 3 or Quake 4.

They look muddled and cartoonish, and everything takes place in rooms
whose textures are so bad it is hard to tell objects apart.

It's like being inside a building make up of recycled spam cans or
something.

To me, several games had *far* better graphics, either because they just
looked better, or were more useful in terms of being able to tell what
things were:

- call of duty
- call of duty 2 (good even in dx 7 mode)
- brothers in arms (both of them)
- far cry
- Unreal 2

and a few more I can't remember.

I am quite *unimpressed* with D3 and Q4, really. I was expecting much
better graphics and stories.

The graphics probably are *technically* better because they are supposed
to show layers and other goodness, but what I saw on screen, even on
very high end rigs, just wasn't that great.

By contrast those I listed above were very good at either just looking
pretty, or doing a very good job of showing me what I needed to see.

So why on earth, or in Hell, would I buy a game that by all accounts is
*almost entirely* composed of stumbling around in pitch darkness?

Amen.

I suppose it makes it a lot easier to render a scene, though, if all you
can actually see of most of it is vague shadows most of the time.

No, that's not it.

It's the same kind of idiot mentality that thinks shaking a camera so
much you can't see what is going on is good.

As a side note, I looked at Quake 4 the other day when I was shopping
for Civ4 for my wife, and thought, "Yawn, more Stroggs." I don't know

How is Civ4? I didn't like Civ3, and am hoping Civ4 will restore the
franchise's former glory.

course, I also like wargames, and not much is out there from the big
publishers.

Matrix games has some interesting stuff, so long as realism and detail
are what you want rather than eye candy.

I'm also about to fall into the abyss of driving games again, because I
have seen "GT Legends" and I *need* it.

Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
Also, how come the graphics still have not shown what everyone really
wants to see:

DESTRUCTABLE ENVIRNMENT

Hello? Game companies? I *need* to blow stuff up. No more of this
bullets hitting things and making little flashes in GI-Joe style.

More to the point, when you blow something up it should actually blow
up, and STAY blown up.