Civ OV suddenly decides my computer isn't good enough

[Cargus10]

I've had Civ IV installed for a while on this machine (AMD Phenom II X6 110T, 8GB RAM, GeForce GTX560) and it's worked with no problems. Suddenly, for no reason I can ascertain, I now get a popup when I start the game that says my system doesn't meet requirements and the graphics settings have all been set to Low. Has anyone seen this before? Any idea what could cause it? I had updated the GeForce driver a bit ago, but I rolled back to the old one and the same thing occurs (and I'm virtually certain I played it OK on the new ones anyhow, but it was worth a try).

Oh, Civ IV is via Steam, if that makes a difference.

 

[s.bernbaum]

Your preferences have somehow gotten reset to default. If your computer is newer than the game's publication date, it won't be in the internal list of compatible computers, which will generate this action unless you have your preferences set to not look for it. Open the file CivilizationIV.ini in a text editor (such as Notepad) and look for these lines:

; Don't show minimum specification warnings
HideMinSpecWarning = 0

Change the "0" to a "1" and save the file. That should cure the trouble. The file is in your Documents CIV folder. If you have show file types disabled (the system default on both Windows 7 and 8), you won't see the .ini part of the name. Be sure that you fix the correct file. There are identically named ones for plain CIV, Warlords, and BTS. Pick the one in the folder for the version of the game where you are having the trouble.

 

[Cargus10]

Thanks, I'll give that a try. No idea why my preferences should have gotten reset, but these things do happen (I try a lot of different mods). It is also probably related to why I get a "invalid voice capture device" warning when I start now (something else I've never touched before).