Civilization III Complete: Black Screen Freeze

[Cy-Fox Unit]

I have Civilization III Complete on Steam, and it always worked on my old Dell Latitude C610 laptop in Windows 2000. In April or May, I got a new laptop, the MSI GX610 to replace it. I got Civilization 4 and it works, and I decided to try to run Civilization III Complete a couple days ago.

When I start it, I get a blank, black screen with nothing but the standard Windows 'wait' hourglass cursor, which can be moved. I've waited about 5 minutes and it does not respond. So I'm forced to terminate it through Task Manager. I've tried various different things, setting Refresh=60 in Conquests.ini, SetRes=1, tried looking for patches and other similar solutions (including reinstallation), to no avail.

I'm enclosing a complete report from DXDiag to help diagnose my problem.

Specifications
MSI GX610 (Laptop)
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 TK-53 (1.8 GHz)
OS: Windows XP Professional SP3
RAM: 2 GB
Graphics Adapter: ATI Radeon 2600 HD
DirectX Version: 9.0c
Sound Card: Realtek High Definition Audio

 

[Padma]

I've tried various different things, setting Refresh=60 in Conquests.ini, SetRes=1, tried looking for patches and other similar solutions (including reinstallation), to no avail.

I hope you just mistyped. that should be KeepRes=1.

Otherwise, I have no idea....

 

[Turner]

It's been my experience that a blank screen is usually a refresh issue. Now, with the setres=1 in there, I don't know if the config just stopped processing, or it is a resolution issue.

You will need to get the resolution up to at least 1024x768, which you've done. So that shouldn't be an issue. I would ensure that your refresh rate is indeed 60, and go from there.

 

[Cy-Fox Unit]

I've tried every refresh rate from 60 to 90 and it does not work, neither does KeepRes (which SetRes was a typo)