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Geek Culture / Some game work, other's just wont run

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Antidote
19
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Joined: 18th Mar 2005
Location: San Francisco, CA
Posted: 30th Mar 2008 18:58 Edited at: 30th Mar 2008 19:01
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Hey guys, I've got a bit of a problem and it's probably the most annoying thing I've ever had to deal with.

I've bought a few games over the last couple months, and some of them run great, no problems at all. However, some games will start, create a window, then crash silently. I've updated video card drivers, direct x, sound card drivers, processor chipset drivers, everything I can think of to no avail.

My System:
Windows XP Professional SP2
AMD X2 Dual Core 4600+
NVIDIA 8800 GT 512mb
Sound Blaster Audigy 7.1
2GB RAM

The game that wont run with some details:

Battlefield 2142, bought a boxed version (is there a digital download version?). The game shows the initial splash screen then doesn't run at all, maybe creates a black screen before failing. The EA easy info program says that all of my system requirments pass, but the 8800 is not recognized by the easy info program.

Unreal Tournament III, boxed version as well (not through steam), same deal as BF, shows the splash screen the crashes no warning whatsoever.

Rome Total War (Gold/Barbarians/Alexander), bought through steam, for a fraction of a second an item labeled Rome : Total War... appears on the taskbar then nothing happens. Process Explorer shows no process running.

TrackMania United, also purchased through steam. Creates a window, says it can't run a graphics test and that I need to manually configure the graphics settings. Played around with the setting for a while, trying all levels of detail in all different aspects of the configuration and the bench test says that it runs at 0 FPS (assuming this means a failure), and the game does the same as the others.

So as you can see I'm a bit lost . Other games work perfectly fine, anything built on the HL2 Source Engine, C&C3, Civ 4, World in Conflict, so I really don't know what the deal is. At one point AudioSurf didn't work, but there was a patch released and it works fine now. As stated before I've updated the usual drivers and such, but I can't find a fix anywhere. It may just all point to me needing a Windows reinstall, but if I can avoid it, I will.

What do you think the problem is? I'm really at a loss here.

[Edit]
Quick update, just downloaded TrackMania Nations (The free version), to see if I could get any results out of that and it's the same story as TrackMania United.

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SunnyKatt
18
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Joined: 16th Sep 2006
Location: USA
Posted: 31st Mar 2008 00:49
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Poor guy. Rome total war is good. But Medieval 2 total war is the best one.
No idea, after seeing 2142 I thought "maybe it requires vista" but then I saw that the other games didn't.

ZEKEGAMES FORUMS-GOOGLE "Zekegames"
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=115938&b=20
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CattleRustler
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Joined: 8th Aug 2003
Location: case modding at overclock.net
Posted: 31st Mar 2008 04:14
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I would uninstall the video drivers, reboot, cancel any dialog that says it found new hardware (if any), then reinstall the latest drivers for your card (most likely 169.21) If that doesnt work, then upgrade the drivers to the 169.44 beta and see if that works.

[href]mod2software[/href]
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gamebird
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 04:36
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See if you can find anything else that doesn't work. That may help to find the problem. If there are some random games that don't work maybe some programs won't work either. Also try and use fraps to see the fps in the games that do work. It might tell us if the graphics card is having problems.
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Antidote
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Joined: 18th Mar 2005
Location: San Francisco, CA
Posted: 31st Mar 2008 04:40 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 05:19
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When I run games that do work I get upwards of 60 FPS (or 60 if the game is limited to it). Currently I'm trying CRs suggestion, I'll let you know how that goes.

[Edit]
Uninstalling and reinstalling doesn't seem to have helped, I'll try the beta drivers.

[Edit2]
I checked the nvidia page a bit and found an auto-driver detector that automatically finds the driver you should download. Not sure why but it says I have driver version 0.0

[Edit3]
The beta drivers don't appear to help either. Any other ideas???

[Edit4]
I ran some tests on canirunit.com and it said I was capable of running all the games I own that do not work. That rules out my system being too weak.

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Osiris
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Joined: 6th Aug 2004
Location: Robbinsdale, MN
Posted: 31st Mar 2008 07:58
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Did you make sure the graphics card is supported by the game? I cant even play Battlefield 2 on my new computer because its "not supported".

RIP Max-Tuesday, November 2 2007
You will be dearly missed.
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Antidote
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 08:17
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According to all of the benchmarking tests I've run it is in fact supported.

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GatorHex
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Location: Gunchester, UK
Posted: 31st Mar 2008 18:42 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 19:10
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It probably you need to update Punkbuster.

I had similar issues getting 2142 up and running on one machine, same as you I went through upgrading all the drivers then removing game cheat software, no luck.

I found downloading PB on it's own was a pain so i downloaded WarRock from (www.warrock.net) instead which auto installs and updates PB then all games started working.

By the way, PB does a crap job of stopping cheats so why they put us through this hassel is beyond me!

If anyone even plays War Rock you will soon see what I mean. Since they started offering prizes it has just encouraged players to cheat

Top player in the hi scores has a kill ration of 87 (40405 kills vs 461 deaths) and they don't smell something bad with that?

DinoHunter (still no nVidia compo voucher!), CPU/GPU Benchmark, DarkFish Encryption DLL, War MMOG (WIP), 3D Model Viewer
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Antidote
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 19:54 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 19:57
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What exactly is punkbuster? an anti-cheating tool?

[Edit]
Updated punkbuster for BF 2142 and no success.

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GatorHex
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Posted: 31st Mar 2008 23:19 Edited at: 31st Mar 2008 23:19
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Yes its anti cheating tool it will stop you playing if it detects a know cheat exe running on your pc.

How did you update it? The only way i found to fix it was the War Rock way because other games wouldn't update it correctly.

You could try deleting the PB files and it should force a redownload.

DinoHunter (still no nVidia compo voucher!), CPU/GPU Benchmark, DarkFish Encryption DLL, War MMOG (WIP), 3D Model Viewer
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CattleRustler
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Location: case modding at overclock.net
Posted: 1st Apr 2008 01:10 Edited at: 1st Apr 2008 01:11
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that PB seemed BS, thats why I bypassed it when installing COD4. I'll live without cod4 mp. There's always more than enough steam mp games to irritate the heck out of me

edit: which brings up an interesting question, I see cod4 available thru steam. does that mean you can add it if youve already installed via IW, and if so will it stay updated and NOT require PB? If so then I might check it out.

[href]mod2software[/href]
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Jeku
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Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Posted: 1st Apr 2008 03:58
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I don't believe you can add third party games you've bought elsewhere to your Steam account (and I've tried with Dawn of War). It makes sense, as Valve wouldn't get a dime and you'd be using tons of bandwidth.


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SunnyKatt
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Posted: 1st Apr 2008 04:59
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I thought you could - there was an "add game" button or somewhat - that adds a non-steam game? I'm probably wrong.

ZEKEGAMES FORUMS-GOOGLE "Zekegames"
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=115938&b=20
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CattleRustler
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Posted: 1st Apr 2008 13:48
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you can, but it wont behave like the valve games, just a glorified shortcut

[href]mod2software[/href]
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Antidote
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Location: San Francisco, CA
Posted: 1st Apr 2008 14:47
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@Gatorhex
There's a PB updater tool that you can get where you add the games you have to a list and it finds the current version of PB installed on that game and updates it.

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