VDMSound to the rescue!

[Neon Deon]

I have a middle of the road computer. Not too slow and way not fast.

System specs.

MB: Biostar M7VIGPRO
CPU: AMD Athlon 2400+
RAM: 1024 MB (1 GIG)
Video: Sapphire Radeon 9600XT (Driver: Omega 2675a)
Sound: On board Via with C-Media audio software and updated driver.
OS: XP PRO SP2
DirectX 9c

With this system I have managed to play without incident: Warcraft III, Morrowind, Dungeon Siege, Pirates of the Carribean, Dungeon Siege II, CIV II, Gettysburgh, CIV III, and Pirates.

I of course encountered the render problem from my ATI card and applied their fix to the letter including installing cat 510 then trying 511 and finaly omega 2675a. They all ended the render error but caused a new CTD when the monitor clicked on to load game. I called customer service and followed the instructions about downloading xml file from Microsoft. It was MSXML 7sp or something like that, and still I got a crash to desk top after 7 hours of trying to get it to run.

Out of frustrated desperation (I will try anything at this point to get it to run), I opened the game with VDMSound. This is a program I use to run old dos games like Daggerfall, CIV I, and Colonization. It worked! I am now one very happy camper.

Now that I was in the game, I went to audio settings and was shocked to find the default audio setting to be C Media. The software and drivers that run my on board sound! Weird. Anyways, here is a link to VDMSound. I use 2.04. Might be worth a shot if all else fails.

Link to VDMSound:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound

 

[AliBi]

i couldn´t believe it, so i tested it myself, in short - stunning!
it really seems to smoothing the gameplay.
i have an intel 3 GHz with 512 MB Ram and an GeForce Ti4200 (128MB) running under windows 2000 with latest nvidia drivers (81.94)
i never had any CTD or crap like that, but i had these excessive loading times and my harddrive never ever saw such tremendous accessing. i was thinking it wanna burn hisself to death
i also tried the other stuff mentioned in the forum, graphics driver, pak-tool and so on, without any luck.

i downloaded the app like Neon Deon said, read the readme about using VDMSound manually and started the game again, without rebooting.

PLZ try this if u are desperate like Neon Deon and me, two people more who at least have fun playing the new (crappy-coded) civilization 4.

ahh by the way, thx Neon Deon

 

[Neon Deon]

i couldn´t believe it, so i tested it myself, in short - stunning!
it really seems to smoothing the gameplay.
i have an intel 3 GHz with 512 MB Ram and an GeForce Ti4200 (128MB) running under windows 2000 with latest nvidia drivers (81.94)
i never had any CTD or crap like that, but i had these excessive loading times and my harddrive never ever saw such tremendous accessing. i was thinking it wanna burn hisself to death
i also tried the other stuff mentioned in the forum, graphics driver, pak-tool and so on, without any luck.

i downloaded the app like Neon Deon said, read the readme about using VDMSound manually and started the game again, without rebooting.

PLZ try this if u are desperate like Neon Deon and me, two people more who at least have fun playing the new (crappy-coded) civilization 4.

ahh by the way, thx Neon Deon

Yay! NP

I dont know why but it worked and I can play and so far I love the game!

 

[atomant]

I assume you all are running it by right clicking on the Civ4 icon and using "run with VDMS" versus running from a dos prompt ?


If so, it did not work for me. However, I love the program and have been using it for a couple years on my old DOS games.

 

[Neon Deon]

I assume you all are running it by right clicking on the Civ4 icon and using "run with VDMS" versus running from a dos prompt ?


If so, it did not work for me. However, I love the program and have been using it for a couple years on my old DOS games.

Well yes by right clicking the shortcut and running VDMS.

The render error has to be cleared up first tho.

 

[Firebird]

I had no render error, 'just' the freeze/BSOD-problem. VDMSound, sadly, did not solve it for me.

I have tried updating my sounddrivers, and any other drivers by the way: No luck there.

However I may be in luck running Civ4 without any sound at all. It seems to be running longer the less sound-options I have on. So I'll try running without sound for a while. I can live with that till the patch comes out, and then I hope all our problems will be gone.

Best regards

Firebird

edit:spelling

 

[Neon Deon]

After running the game for awahile i discovered my system would CTD after scrolling and zooming the screen. So I disabled write combining in the advanced settings along with adjusting my performance higher and turning off vsync on the omega 3D custom menu. I havent had a crash after that. I am crossing my fingers.