Fighting Steel on new computer

[mrjmaint]

I have a new computer that I have loaded Fighting Steel. It is Windows XP not Vista. Has Directx 9. The computer crashes when I exit game.

The new system has a NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS graphics card. If I remember from posts on the old server the newer NVIDIA drivers do not support Fighting Steel.

Is this true? And if so what driver version will work? Or, is there a work around?

Thanks in advance.

[asnrobert]

The regular Fighting Steel game will not work with XP Service Pack 2. Make sure you have downloaded Fighting Steel Project 10.43, as this will make the game work, plus it has added ships and game tweaks. Go to this page:http://forums.navalwarfare.org/showthread.php?t=6

You will be able to download the latest version of FSP there, as well as the manual and other goodies.

[COlPrice2002]

Hi,

You're right, the lter nVidia drivers don't exit cleanly from Fighting steel.

Version 94.24 does exit cleanly (I'm using nVidia 6600 GT card)

This version is here:-http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_94.24_2.html

It doesn't explicitly support the newer card, so you may need to experiment.

HTH

Colin

[Glossza]

Hi

GeForce Release 175 just came out May 16, 2008 ver 175.16

Noticed that it fixes some other games that were crashing on exit.

This version supports from 9800 down to fx5100 - a lot of cards

Take a look http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_175.16_whql.htm


It supports your card, if it works let us know

Currently I have a 7100 GS ver. 93.71 with no problems, but I would like to update the drivers one day.

[COlPrice2002]

Unfortunately,

Version 175 doesn't cure this problem.... (2 hours of uninstall/reboor/reinstall etc).


Colin

[Glossza]

Sorry to hear that Colin -

I just tried the same thing with my computer

Loaded new driver, everything seemed fine - except I lost all my taskbar icons?

Played Fighting Steel - OK , On exit - Fatal Crash.

After reboot, rolled back driver, everything OK again.

MRJMAINT has to give us feedback about your suggestion to roll back his drivers, which looks like its the only way to go at this point.
The new driver does not work for the 6000 or 7000 series card and Fighting Steel. The older drivers have no problems for me and you. Like you said, do they work for the 8000 series cards ? - MRJMAINT has to experiment.

The crash seems to happen when the game switches, on exit , from its native 640x480 resolution back to whatever the current computer resolution is. This could be one of a thousand reasons, but sounds like a bug in the newer drivers. Not too many people use 640X480 resolution anymore. Did Nvidia forget about it? Who knows. I would switch the computer into 640X480 Mode before playing, then play and exit and see if that works.
Nvidia cards have a lot of tweeks on them, I would experiment with the Digital Flat Panel Settings and Application Control.

Anyhow, here is a list to all of the older drivers

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html

MRJMAINT, like you said Colin, has to pick a driver similar to ours and experiment.

Then we can go from there.

John

[mrjmaint]

I have tried various older drivers. When my system goes to install them I get the message "No supported hardware is found". It seams that the 8400 will not load the older drivers. Another problem could be that my computer in question is a new Dell laptop. They tend to have their own versions of nVidia drivers.

Thanks for all the input.

[old_pop2000]

I've been reading these posts about problems with CTD using XP.

MS Windows XP is actually MS Windows NT 5.12 internally. It is a full 32 bit operating system that runs 16 bit applications in what we call a Virtual Dos Machine. It essentially has some 16 bit support code in the kernal. The subsystem is called NTVDM. Here is something from Microsoft that might help you with your issues.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314106

Sorry to hear about your problems. I've had to install and setup a Virtual Win 98 system running under MS Virtual PC 2007, to run the original Steel Panthers. It needed a few tweaks to get it to run well.

[Glossza]

Fighting steel is a windows 95/98 program, which worked well on that operating system. As you know, when we switched to windows XP, there were quite a few problems running 95/98 programs. Fighting steel was one of them. NWS did a great job, with alot of time and effort, to port this game to XP. In order to play this game in XP, you must have the original disk installed, download the Fighting Steel Project 10.43 and install it, and make sure you have Direct X9 installed. This process works on most computers. The problem is NVidia. When they went to the 8000 series of cards they included support for DirectX 10. Even if you hook into DirectX9.0 on this card it may run subprocesses related to DirectX 10. On top of that NVidia drivers are known to be buggy. Just check the websites. This game must have DirectX 9.0 into order to run.

Before making operation system changes to get the program to run, which may or may not work, I would trouble shoot the video card. We need more information about that New Dell Laptop.

Is the 8400 video card on the motherboard or is it a plug in? If it is a plug in, maybe we can swap it out for a 6000 or 7000 series video card to see if that works. Most laptops don't have plug ins' and it is impossible to change the card. otherwise -These older cards are now very, very cheap. Or maybe, we can swap it out for another cheap video card. Some of these older cards that are giving away for nothing. What is the Computer Model, etc. I've done many Desktop video card swaps, real easy, I've yet to do a laptop video card swap. But I've changed LCD screens, installed memory and added hard drives on laptops. All were easy.

You mentioned that you got the original Steel Panthers game to work on your computer by using a program similar to DosBox. I love that game. I use DosBox to run my old dos games on XP. Not sure if I ran Steel Panthers in it, didn't need to - see below. I can even run Commodore 64 programs on my XP using CCS64.

I had no problems running Steel Panthers in windows 95/98 ( It is a DOS game ). It did not work in XP. Matrix games did a great job porting this game to XP and on top of that adding a lot of new features you would enjoy.

You may want to check this out:
Goto Matrix Games website, goto games ( top menu bar)
In the Scroll bar, scroll down until you see Steel Panthers: World at War - General Edition and click on it.
Click on the Box cover next to the scroll bar
goto downloads

DownLoad:
1) SPWAW v.8.20.Full
2) Steel Panthers World at War Patch v8.3
3) Steel Panthers World at War Patch v8.4

Install each one, one at a time, In the exact order above: 1 then 2 then 3.

Done, Great Game, Best of all It's Free, Works in XP with no modifications.

Once I get some more information about that Laptop, I'll do some more research and see what I can come up with.

John

[mrjmaint]

Glossza is correct about it being a nVidia problem. I have two other XP machines, 1 Desktop and 1 Laptop, that have ATI video adaptors on them and Fighting Steel works great on them.

To answer the question, "Is the 8400 video card on the motherboard or is it a plug in?". I am 95% sure it is on the Motherboard. The laptop is a Dell Vostro 1400 which is the business version of the Inspiron 1420. Everything I have looked up indicates it is on the Motherboard.

[Glossza]

Ok Mrjmaint, here's what I found out for you.

When you buy the Dell Vostro 1400 you have an option of either using the on board intel integrated graphics media accelerator X3100 or upgrading to the better Nvidia 8400m. This upgrade is done at the factory as follows:

To upgrade the video The Vostro 1400 offers one discrete solution: the 128 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8400M GS (G86), which is explained in greater detail here. This graphics solution is known as a ‛discrete down‛ configuration, which means the video card is soldered to the system board. In the event of a failure, replace the system board.

There is no way to change video cards once this is done.

This leaves us with very few options:

Changing the driver for the 8400M ( M is for mobile ) to the desktop driver version, I saw this being done I need to do more research as to how. This may or may not work.

Tweaking the setting in the Nvidia manager for the card, see if there is any checkmarks for DX10 and uncheck it. Read up on the manual, there may be something hidden in it which allows the card to work with the game. I would experiment with the Digital Flat Panel Settings and Application Control settings after you read up on them.


I'll get back to you on how to change a mobile driver to a desktop driver for the same card,

Otherwise it's good to hear that you are playing the game on your other computers, and it works fine. Talk to you soon.

John

[Glossza]

Mrjmaint

While doing some more research for your computer, found out that Nvidia does not support OEM cards like the one you have in your computer. That means the drivers on their website will not work in some cases with your computer so you have to go through your computer maker.

Look at the following:


www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8M_techspecs.html (http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8M_techspecs.html)

These are the specifications of the card.


I found 8400m and XP dirvers here: ( non nvidia site )

http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/GRAPHICS-BOARD/NVIDIA/NVIDIA-ForceWare-GeFirce-Go-10134-WHQL.shtml

This is version 101.34 which Nvidia does not have on their website.

See if this version works, that board is actually made for vista direct10 support but this version supports XP and dX9

Dell has drivers also:

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R158222&SystemID=VOS_N_1500&servicetag=&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=13668&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=1&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=6&fileid=211242

This is version 101.28 for xp

as you can see the first version seems to be an update, I would go with that first, then try the dell version.
Neither for these versions are on the Nvidia web site - they are OEM support versions.


See that following site: ( These seem to be the original drivers )

www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_100.64.html (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_100.64.html)

which are used for vista and DX10

Hope this helps

John