12-30-2004, 11:39 PM
Just thought I'd share my Rome: Total War installation nightmare in case its of any help to other users with similarly antiquated computers.<br>
<br>
RTW was not finding Directx9 even though I installed it with the game. I did some net troubleshooting and learned that the Directx 9 that comes with RTW doesn't install properly - you end up with a mix of files.<strong>Before you install Rome Total War, install Directx9 B from another source - download, or its on most of the current magazine disks</strong>. Then do your RTW installation, and DON'T install its DirectX9. Its important to get this right, as <strong>DirectX9 can't be uninstalled</strong>, and won't overwrite itself. I ended up doing a clean install. You also seem to need the 30 meg HD space - I tried dual booting windows (don't go there!...luckily I'd saved all my Docs to CD first.....) so that I wouldn't have to wipe my HD - but the 17 meg I had, even with a clean install, still wouldn't let it run right, and kept crashing. I suspect it needed the extra space for swap files or something, but I'm not a geek so don't know. This was probably compounded by my fairly small 256M ram and old Athlon64 processor.<br>
<br>
The other thing I found was that graphics hardware acceleration (I'd had mine down a few notches due to crashes) needs to be on full to enable DirectX 3D. So go into your System Device Manager and check that they are all on full acceleration.<br>
<br>
Although the box says NVidia GeForce 3 and above, not all Nvidia cards are, aparrently, Directx9 compatable. I went out an bought a new NVidia 3DForceFX5200 card (about as much as my old MOB can handle), and another stick of 256DDR ram, then did a clean install of Win98 (yeah, need a new OS too...) from scratch, saying goodbye to my Linux partition. Oh, and I took off the USB mouse and put on a PS2, so there'd be one less process running!<br>
<br>
Make sure you read the 'readme' files - there's advice there you'll need about internet security settings. Also I've read, in my net trawling, about a drive letter problem - it may only be an issue if you have multiple drives - but I can't find it again to share it here!<br>
<br>
erado.totalwar.org/surviv...ckmain.htm<br>
<br>
It was worth it.... finally got to watch the pregame cinematics (fab) and play without a crash. Now what will I do do keep the kids occupied while I kick some barbarian butt?.........<br>
<br>
cheers<br>
Pictoria<br>
<br>
<br>
<p></p><i></i>
<br>
RTW was not finding Directx9 even though I installed it with the game. I did some net troubleshooting and learned that the Directx 9 that comes with RTW doesn't install properly - you end up with a mix of files.<strong>Before you install Rome Total War, install Directx9 B from another source - download, or its on most of the current magazine disks</strong>. Then do your RTW installation, and DON'T install its DirectX9. Its important to get this right, as <strong>DirectX9 can't be uninstalled</strong>, and won't overwrite itself. I ended up doing a clean install. You also seem to need the 30 meg HD space - I tried dual booting windows (don't go there!...luckily I'd saved all my Docs to CD first.....) so that I wouldn't have to wipe my HD - but the 17 meg I had, even with a clean install, still wouldn't let it run right, and kept crashing. I suspect it needed the extra space for swap files or something, but I'm not a geek so don't know. This was probably compounded by my fairly small 256M ram and old Athlon64 processor.<br>
<br>
The other thing I found was that graphics hardware acceleration (I'd had mine down a few notches due to crashes) needs to be on full to enable DirectX 3D. So go into your System Device Manager and check that they are all on full acceleration.<br>
<br>
Although the box says NVidia GeForce 3 and above, not all Nvidia cards are, aparrently, Directx9 compatable. I went out an bought a new NVidia 3DForceFX5200 card (about as much as my old MOB can handle), and another stick of 256DDR ram, then did a clean install of Win98 (yeah, need a new OS too...) from scratch, saying goodbye to my Linux partition. Oh, and I took off the USB mouse and put on a PS2, so there'd be one less process running!<br>
<br>
Make sure you read the 'readme' files - there's advice there you'll need about internet security settings. Also I've read, in my net trawling, about a drive letter problem - it may only be an issue if you have multiple drives - but I can't find it again to share it here!<br>
<br>
erado.totalwar.org/surviv...ckmain.htm<br>
<br>
It was worth it.... finally got to watch the pregame cinematics (fab) and play without a crash. Now what will I do do keep the kids occupied while I kick some barbarian butt?.........<br>
<br>
cheers<br>
Pictoria<br>
<br>
<br>
<p></p><i></i>
