She blinded me with crashes. She blinded me! With Crashes!

[TigerNight]

Oh, neues thema means new topic or something. Alrighty.

This game was already pretty old when I bought it, but now it's really old. I used to run it on a Windows98SE machine with my trusty 3DFX card and I played it through the UCS campaign and dabbled in the others before I, uh, umm, what was I saying?

Oh, right. Anyway, I just installed this on my XP machine and I'm using a pair of ATI 4850s but so far haven't seen the need to enable crossfire. The game seems to run okay on my HDTV at 1920 x 1080. I use Direct 3D so I can use my TV as a secondary monitor and possibly have game related stuff open on my web browser on my primary. I have a list of concerns I'd really appreciate any help I could get. Here they are, in order from most important to least.

1. The game constantly crashes. So far, I've only tried the tutorial for UCS and if I keep playing, it will eventually crash. The game also crashes whenever I press F1, possibly other keys as well. I do have the 2.8.7.1 English patch installed, which was a chore to find. Used the one at wargamer.com.

2. If I have the intro video enabled, I get a black screen and hear some music and then the game will not respond any longer. I need to kill it with task manager at that point. The recruitment videos play just fine, but I'm worried that other cutscenes will have the same problem. XP does not like MediaPlayer6.4 and when I tried to install it under 98SE compatibility mode, I got some .dll file error at the end. I'm not too worried I'm missing the intro video, I'm just worried about other potential playback problems.

3. Fiddling in the registry, I found a way to enable windowed mode. However, it doesn't have any benefit to using it. What I want is to untrap my mouse cursor so I could multitask and use my other screen if I wanted to. If I enable windowed mode, it doesn't work at all for my secondary (TV) monitor because the window's stuck in position on the primary monitor, with it all black and most of the window out of view. Windowed mode does work on my primary monitor as long as the window size is smaller than what the desktop is already set to and I'm not allowed to move it. I'd appreciate any workarounds to freeing up my mouse cursor and such.

System info
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with SP3 installed
2 GB RAM
500,000,000,000 TB hard drive
2 ATI/AMD Radeon HD 4850s with the latest catalyst drivers installed
Intel Q6700 Core2Quad proc@2.67 Ghz

[Ifitmovesnukeit]

The Earth 2 engine often seems to choke on multicore systems. First thing to do would be to set its affinity to one core only.

The F1 crash comes up time and time again, and in my experience it's because Earth2 also doesn't like high resolutions that weren't common back in its day. I managed to get the construction centre to stop crashing the game once I'd set it to something like the 3rd-highest res I was technically capable of using.

And there's no way this game will need that second HD 4850.

Edit: And I think you might have mashed the keyboard when typing up your hard disk space.

[TigerNight]

So far, I haven't had an issue with multiple cores. The game hasn't crashed since I started running the game in a non-widescreen resolution, currently set to 1360 x 1024. The thing might've just crashed "randomly" before when I pressed F1 and didn't realize it. The F1 bug only persists for non 4:3 resolutions. However, setting it to a resolution other than the current default will give this black screen but working controls side effect if I switch tasks. I need to either use task manager to quit or know what buttons to push to quit. This is only for Direct3D mode. If I run the game in OpenGL mode at 1280 X 1024, both of my screens change resolutions, but I'm able to switch tasks without any problems. A nice compromise is to run OpenGL at 1280 X 1024 in windowed mode, which has no side effects. Another quirk I've found is how Direct3D will not display windowed mode on my secondary monitor at 1024 x 768 or larger. The testing thing seems to be more accurate than what I've read.

So far, I've been unable to get that damn intro video to run. I guess there's always Youtube. Eek, URL posting denied under 15 posts. Uhhh, take this, auto filter!
youtube.com/watch?v=Cnr1np3BU2E

[Mclaren]

check under operation elephant it should come up, Earth 2150 intro movie is a live action battle, that is so cool.

[Syphedias]

Please don't reply to threads older than 6 months.

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