Blackscreen with XP SP2 before intro movie

[doug5516]

Hi,

I've been reading through the postings and I have noticed alot of people having trouble with Civ3 on XP after the intro movie plays. The problem I am having is the Civ3 displays the splash screen and then the entire screen goes black and the stays black. I have to call the windows task manager to end the program to get back my system. By the way, the windows task manager says that Civ3 is not responding.

Things I have already tries: set windows compatiblity mode to Win98, made sure that Civ3 was listed as an exception in the windows firewall, placed the lines Keepres=1 and Refresh=60 in the ini file, and set my display resolution to 800 by 600. None of this works.

Now for the rub. When I first got my system, Civ3 ran. It ran well as a matter of fact. I had a system crash where I had to reinstall the OS. It was after this that I reinstalled Civ3 but could no longer get it to run. The reinstallation of the OS was from the factory disk that shipped with the system and should have set the OS (and the entire system) back to exactly how it was the first time I install Civ3.

If anyone has any suggestions on what might cause this problem and what I might could do to fix it that I have not already tried, I would be greatly interested in hearing from you.

Thanks,

Doug

 

[doug5516]

I solved the problem. The only thing I did not do was upgrade the video driver. I didn't suspect this as a problem because as I said in my first posting, Civ3 had worked before I reinstalled windows XP. But just for grins I checked my video device driver and found that windows XP had installed the generic driver when I reinstalled it (I assume it was when I reinstalled it, I hope Windows XP doesn't just go around and remove drivers). Anyway I downloaded and reinstalled the correct driver and Civ3 runs once again.

 

[crh0708]

Hi doug5516

Can you help???

I have exactly the same problem, It says no video card is installed on my Pc, And I don't know the name. Can't find invoice. Did you have a Dell Dimension 4700 by any chance?


Thanks
Steve

 

[FinnMcCool]

Hey doug,
I've been having the same problem lately. In more than one game. I stepped in a pile of Windows updates, and in another game, it hangs and the event log shows "you should update your display drivers" which I did. Apparently, with the most recent Windows updates for XP, some games need a new driver. Seems you may have solved your problem, anybody out there have some advice on mine?

I start Civ3 and go to "Civ-content" where my custom mod is located. I've had no problems loading this in the past. Now, with the new "improved" updates, I hit the blackscreen of death and hit Task Manager. It shows some interesting things. "Commit charge" is 303MB and I only have 256MB RAM. Does this mean that too many processes are running and my RAM is overloaded?

So I hit the Civ3 app in Task Manager, and changed its priority to "high". This made the most interesting thing happen. I went to the applications window in TM, and Civ3 showed "not responding" then "running" for a few secs, then "not responding" again, back and forth...

Perhaps with my limited RAM it takes putting Civ on high priority for it to even run intermittently???

Do I merely need more RAM?

Can't a guy survive on 256 Megs anymore? What's happening to this world??