VladimirKazakov
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2003
- Messages
- 5
Fellow Civ IIIers,
Having been a fan of the entire Civ series and Alpha Centauri I was quite excited to get CIV III for Christmas. The box art, manual, game concept and graphics were all reasons for excitement. It seemed truly another home run by Sid Meier. It seemed that way for the first five minutes of play and then suddenly my PC instantly goes black and is rebooting. Figuring this was some fluke I played again and the same thing happened. In fact I cannot play CIV III without this happening. The shut down is as immediate as if you unplugged the PC. No desktop and no error messages to trouble shoot. Just the instantaneous shut down and reboot. I finally called infrogrames support and spoke with a very friendly and helpful tech. He walked me through the following steps:
1.) Had me run and review my Dxdiag. No issues discovered there.
2.) Had me remove the other Lucida fonts and copy the Lucida font file in Civ III to my windoes fonts. I only had 87 fonts to begin with so the 255 rule was not an issue.
3.) Reviewed device manager for sound and conflict issues. Again nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
4.) I currently have the most current Nvidia Driver and AC97 Sound Driver available. My motherboard (K7T266 Pro2) has the most current VIA chipset. I am running an AMD Athlon 1800+ at 1.5 Ghz with a ASUS GeForce2 TI Video Card(64 Meg).
5.) My Windows ME is updated and current. My hard drive is defragged and Norton Windoctor has shown no windows conflicts or registry issues.
I experience this with no other game or software, only CIV III. That even includes the vastly more complicated games like IL2 and CFS2, both flight simulators. What is odd is that the amount of time varies before reboot. Sometimes it's as little as a minute. Once I played almost two hours before the reboot hit. It seems to be independent of any screen or input. One night I left the game to make some coffee. While I was gone it did the reboot again. The tech recommended disabling the sound driver in device manager. The theory is that if it was sound related the game would play with the device disabled. Still the same thing even with the sound driver disabled.
It is a concern to me that this tech forum is overflowing with issues about CIV III. I have never seen any other product forum that had such a mass of postings about problems with the product. In any event is there anyone else that has this issue and/or anyone who has a solution? I really like the game and would hate to have to return it but it looks as if there may be no other choice.
Thanks In Advance,
Vladimir
Having been a fan of the entire Civ series and Alpha Centauri I was quite excited to get CIV III for Christmas. The box art, manual, game concept and graphics were all reasons for excitement. It seemed truly another home run by Sid Meier. It seemed that way for the first five minutes of play and then suddenly my PC instantly goes black and is rebooting. Figuring this was some fluke I played again and the same thing happened. In fact I cannot play CIV III without this happening. The shut down is as immediate as if you unplugged the PC. No desktop and no error messages to trouble shoot. Just the instantaneous shut down and reboot. I finally called infrogrames support and spoke with a very friendly and helpful tech. He walked me through the following steps:
1.) Had me run and review my Dxdiag. No issues discovered there.
2.) Had me remove the other Lucida fonts and copy the Lucida font file in Civ III to my windoes fonts. I only had 87 fonts to begin with so the 255 rule was not an issue.
3.) Reviewed device manager for sound and conflict issues. Again nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
4.) I currently have the most current Nvidia Driver and AC97 Sound Driver available. My motherboard (K7T266 Pro2) has the most current VIA chipset. I am running an AMD Athlon 1800+ at 1.5 Ghz with a ASUS GeForce2 TI Video Card(64 Meg).
5.) My Windows ME is updated and current. My hard drive is defragged and Norton Windoctor has shown no windows conflicts or registry issues.
I experience this with no other game or software, only CIV III. That even includes the vastly more complicated games like IL2 and CFS2, both flight simulators. What is odd is that the amount of time varies before reboot. Sometimes it's as little as a minute. Once I played almost two hours before the reboot hit. It seems to be independent of any screen or input. One night I left the game to make some coffee. While I was gone it did the reboot again. The tech recommended disabling the sound driver in device manager. The theory is that if it was sound related the game would play with the device disabled. Still the same thing even with the sound driver disabled.
It is a concern to me that this tech forum is overflowing with issues about CIV III. I have never seen any other product forum that had such a mass of postings about problems with the product. In any event is there anyone else that has this issue and/or anyone who has a solution? I really like the game and would hate to have to return it but it looks as if there may be no other choice.
Thanks In Advance,
Vladimir
