After unwrapping my (legal) copy of Civ III, and installing it, I clicked on the icon to start Civ III with great excitment.

After a long wait, a large, fat bar of white spread horizontally across my screen, and the infogrames logo began to appear, but then it stopped. My computer froze and it never get's past the intro screen, what can I do?

Well, the screen being slow to start can be an indication of insufficient memory, or multitasking issues. Can you give some details about what system you are running? RAm? Processor? VideoCard? Do you meet the minimum specs?

One thing that might be worth trying is patching to the latest version (Civ 1.29f - look here (http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3patches.shtml) ) - there may be some hardware fixes etc.

300 MHz Pentium II Celeron processor

256 Meg RAM

30 Gig of disk space

Video and sound cards able to run DirectX 8.0 or higher.

Well, with a 300 MHz Celeron, you are right at the bottom end of the required specs. :( But that shouldn't cause the problems you are seeing. What OS are you running (win 98??) You could try updating the graphics card drivers.

Okay, I did that, and it still does not work.

Have you got directx 8a installed?

I have DirectX 9.0b installed

Ok - can you give us the details of your video card? It is most likely a video card issue (I think). I just hope its not that your PC is too slow...:(

Although it may sound strange, you might want to consider dropping back to directx 8a. I have read quite a few accounts of people having problems with directx 9.

I don't think the probelm lies with the computer being slow as I play on:
300 MHz Pentium II Celeron processor

98MB of RAM

and a 12GB HD

And I play just fine.

Hmm. This may be it. Under "ATIVideoCD" there is an error. I'll correct it and post when I find out something.

Hmm. The system says that the driver doesn't match the adapter so that might be it, thanks for your help.