limpkit
Chieftain
Hello everyone, I have just registered only to post this. 
I've been reading this forum for the last few days trying to find a way to run Civ4 in my 2-year-old laptop without success, because I suffer from the floating-eyeballs & black-tiles problem (also know as the Cheshire cat syndrome
).
After a while, I convinced myself that the problem was the amount of memory on the video card and maybe the video capabilities of the chip itself (ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 16MB memory). Since I spent most of the time since playing Civ4 in my desktop PC (Nvidia video card) it was only today that I retried to get the game working on my laptop again.
Guess what? I tried to play the American revolution scenario at the whole map showed up! But the normal game won't display the map...
So, I took my Age of Empires III CDs and installed the game in my laptop to check if it would work, and it did, I played AoE 3 on it for over 3 hours and it wasn't too slow, perfectly bearable.
Now, brace yourselves : Age of Empires III has a minimum requirement of 64MB video card with Hardware Transform & Lighting and it works with my laptop's video card, I can barely notice a difference between the game in the laptop and the same on my desktop PC, speed and resolution aside of course.
Also, the fact that the map shows in some of the scenarios means that the ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 (and better) CAN display the map, and it's not even too slow. Something is of course wrong but I do not think this specific hardware is the problem, and certainly not the amount of video memory available. Usually if the video memory is not enough DirectX uses normal memory.
For those of you having this problem, please try the American Revolution scenario, to check if you can see the game tiles.
Just my 0.02 hoping I can bring some hope to some "business-user" players out there
P.S. Please forgive my english, I am a portuguese native.
I've been reading this forum for the last few days trying to find a way to run Civ4 in my 2-year-old laptop without success, because I suffer from the floating-eyeballs & black-tiles problem (also know as the Cheshire cat syndrome
).After a while, I convinced myself that the problem was the amount of memory on the video card and maybe the video capabilities of the chip itself (ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 16MB memory). Since I spent most of the time since playing Civ4 in my desktop PC (Nvidia video card) it was only today that I retried to get the game working on my laptop again.
Guess what? I tried to play the American revolution scenario at the whole map showed up! But the normal game won't display the map...
So, I took my Age of Empires III CDs and installed the game in my laptop to check if it would work, and it did, I played AoE 3 on it for over 3 hours and it wasn't too slow, perfectly bearable.
Now, brace yourselves : Age of Empires III has a minimum requirement of 64MB video card with Hardware Transform & Lighting and it works with my laptop's video card, I can barely notice a difference between the game in the laptop and the same on my desktop PC, speed and resolution aside of course.
Also, the fact that the map shows in some of the scenarios means that the ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 (and better) CAN display the map, and it's not even too slow. Something is of course wrong but I do not think this specific hardware is the problem, and certainly not the amount of video memory available. Usually if the video memory is not enough DirectX uses normal memory.
For those of you having this problem, please try the American Revolution scenario, to check if you can see the game tiles.
Just my 0.02 hoping I can bring some hope to some "business-user" players out there
P.S. Please forgive my english, I am a portuguese native.
