Civ III (1.29f) and XP SP2

[Alameda Duke]

I have a Toshiba Laptop, Satellite 1415-115S Model.

It includes nVidia GeForce video, a DVD/CDRW drive, 512 MB of RAM and a 2 GHz Celeron chip.

It has been running XP Home, with SP 1 installed, and with CIV III quite happy.

I had to re-image the machine due to an IP stack problem. I used the recovery disks from Toshiba, then fully patched XP, including an install of SP 2 from a CD-ROM version of the patch. ONE DIFFERENCE from prior install other than SP 2 is that the drive is compressed, which should not cause the problem described below:

I've tried two different installs (standard) of CIV III. Each time, when I try to open the program, the opening screen (Play . . . uninstall . . ., etc) comes up, and shortly thereafter, a dialog box telling me to remove the CD and open and re-load the CD Drive as the CD could not be recognized.

Bottom line: can't run the program.

There are some suggestions in other threads that SP2 breaks CIV III sometimes, and nobody yet knows exactly when/how. Is that the latest intelligence on the subject? I'm not running any kind of CD Drive spoofer or anything else not plain vanilla XP except for having loaded XP PowerToys from Microsoft.

Any ideas? Any help? Any benefit from trying Civ III: complete?

Hardly seems civilized.

TIA for any assistance.

 

[Chieftess]

Read this. It's stickied at the top of this forum.

 

[Alameda Duke]

Thanks for the thought -- I had already checked this before my original posting. My version of the data listed is a little different as I'm running a laptop and not a desktop, and I'm not positive whether the Optical storage drive is primary or secondary (strongly suspect secondary.....), but they are both very similar to what they are "supposed" to read according to the stickied post. One is Ultra Mode 5 and the other is Ultra mode 2 and neither has any other choice available except "PIO".

 

[Alameda Duke]

HOORAY

After reading the advice on type of DMA I/O to use for the CD drive, I got brave and changed mine from DMA to PIO. That seems to have found the CIV III CD in the drive and allows gameplay.

I don't know if it does anything else heinous to my laptop -- only time will tell

For now, and this seems to be in opposition to the sticky at the top of the postings here, turning off DMA (because I didn't have the same DMA type available as discussed above) appears to have worked. It's one more thing to try if you are struggling post SP2 on XP.

 

[ainwood]

Good to see that worked - I haven't seen much feedback on whether changing the drive settings actually works.... but its worth trying if all else fails.

 

[cidknee]

im having a similar problem, mines a desktop with winxp sp2 and well when i load 1.29 it crashes. weird. In order to get back to playing I have to totoal unistall/ reinstall everything.

 

[fishpimp]

I'm having the same problem as Cidknee, but with SP1. I finally managed to get up and running again with the minimal installation, unpatched. I was hoping that now I've installed SP2 it will run properly, but you all have robbed me of my hope.

 

[cidknee]

well after i did a unistal reinstall and then i defragged, ran ad aware and a virus program, resarted the pc and guess what ive been problem free for a week... WEIRD but it works WOOHOO

 

[Alameda Duke]

Well -- the news is mostly good. I've gotten to play an entire game on 1.29f with XP Service Pack 2. Everything went rather well until I actually won the game (a cultural victory for Rome), only to be told that there were missing text files that crashed the end-game procedure, so the game didn't make it into the hall of fame, nor was the post-game movie made available. It just dumped me back to the desktop.

I will replay from a late save and try to write down the error messages, but as is SO typical of Windows, the dialog box is not large enough to display the entire error message . . . .

Take heart, though. It does appear possible to play the game in its entirety under SP2. I had some fits in the beginning, couldn't get the upgrade to install fully, then couldn't run, but eventually it worked, and once it did it stayed working.

 

[ainwood]

Well -- the news is mostly good. I've gotten to play an entire game on 1.29f with XP Service Pack 2. Everything went rather well until I actually won the game (a cultural victory for Rome), only to be told that there were missing text files that crashed the end-game procedure, so the game didn't make it into the hall of fame, nor was the post-game movie made available. It just dumped me back to the desktop.

I will replay from a late save and try to write down the error messages, but as is SO typical of Windows, the dialog box is not large enough to display the entire error message . . . .

Take heart, though. It does appear possible to play the game in its entirety under SP2. I had some fits in the beginning, couldn't get the upgrade to install fully, then couldn't run, but eventually it worked, and once it did it stayed working.

Missing text files will generally mean that you are playing a scenario that hasn't got the pediaicons.txt file updated to reflect the civ names.

This is a problem with the scenario installation, not with XP nor with Civ (directly - although they could have made it so that you don't get a crash-to-desktop with these errors!)

If you get as much of the text as you can (or even a screenshot), I can probably give you an updated pediaicons.txt file that will prevent this crash.