Farbourne
Rear Admiral
Hi Everyone,
I posted this question in the Standoff forum, but I've since realized that the issue with actually with SecretOps, so I thought reposting it here in the general Tech support thread might get a more helpful answer, since it's not really something the Standoff folk specifically may know...
The short version: Secret Ops, and hence Standoff (and probably Unknown Enemy, though I haven't tried it) won't run on my computer anymore.
I have an oldish Dell Latitude laptop, and I used to run Secret Ops (and Kilrathi saga, and other WC titles) just fine on it, up till about two months ago. At the time it was running WinXP SP1. Then, because I was running SP1, a nasty virus got in and ate my entire OS, and I had to reformat it and install WinXP fresh. Now I have WinXP SP2, with all the updates. The only other difference from my previous system configuration that I'm aware of is that I also now run a better virus scanner--Kaspersky instead of McAfee.
Since Wing Commander is fraught with awesome, one of the very first programs I tried to reload on my system was Secret Ops and Standoff. I downloaded the Secret Ops distro from CIC, and Standoff Eps 1-4 from the Standoff folks website. Installed both, set both to Win98 compatibility mode, and tried running them.
No dice. When I try to run either executable, the screen goes black (sometimes after resizing my desktop to whatever resolution the program wants, but this is normal as far as I can remember), thinks for a minute, and then crashes, with a Windows message that secretops.exe or standoff.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.
I've tried Win95 compatibility mode, Win98 compatibility mode, and no compatibility mode turned on; with full audio acceleration and with audio acceleration turned off; with both Standoff and Secret Ops installed, and with just Secret Ops; and all possible permutations of the above, and nothing works. I've also tried turning off my anti-virus program in case it's messing with anything. Still nothing works. Same symptoms every time. I've also tried changing the program to run with "D3D" video acceleration instead of the default, "software", and that didn't have any effect either.
For the record, my system has an ATI graphics card (not sure which one...whatever is built into a Dell Latitude C640), and I'm running DirectX 9c, which, when I run the dxdiag.exe diagnostics, claims everything is fine with my DirectX install.
The only other thing that may be (but probably is not) relevant is when I first did the install, and tried to change the video setting to either D3D or "software", from the launcher panel, I got an error message that "glide2x.dll" could not be found. At the suggestion of another CIC tech support thread, I found the file online and installed it, and now I don't get that error any more, but the program still doesn't work.
I've seen descriptions of what seem like similar problems in other threads searching through the CIC forums, but the solution always seems to be "enable compatibility mode and/or turn off audio acceleration". I've tried both of these things and neither works.
If anyone has any other suggestions of what to try, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm all out of ideas, and am kind of bummed because I really wanted to play Ep 4 of Standoff (and also, have never finished Secret Ops). I'm a little out of my element--I used to be quite computer savvy, but haven't been involved in troubleshooting Windows systems since about 1998 or so, and things seem to have changed slightly since then...
Especially with graphics cards and graphics engines. Of course, the problem may be graphics, sound, memory, or something else...I really have no clue...
I posted this question in the Standoff forum, but I've since realized that the issue with actually with SecretOps, so I thought reposting it here in the general Tech support thread might get a more helpful answer, since it's not really something the Standoff folk specifically may know...
The short version: Secret Ops, and hence Standoff (and probably Unknown Enemy, though I haven't tried it) won't run on my computer anymore.
I have an oldish Dell Latitude laptop, and I used to run Secret Ops (and Kilrathi saga, and other WC titles) just fine on it, up till about two months ago. At the time it was running WinXP SP1. Then, because I was running SP1, a nasty virus got in and ate my entire OS, and I had to reformat it and install WinXP fresh. Now I have WinXP SP2, with all the updates. The only other difference from my previous system configuration that I'm aware of is that I also now run a better virus scanner--Kaspersky instead of McAfee.
Since Wing Commander is fraught with awesome, one of the very first programs I tried to reload on my system was Secret Ops and Standoff. I downloaded the Secret Ops distro from CIC, and Standoff Eps 1-4 from the Standoff folks website. Installed both, set both to Win98 compatibility mode, and tried running them.
No dice. When I try to run either executable, the screen goes black (sometimes after resizing my desktop to whatever resolution the program wants, but this is normal as far as I can remember), thinks for a minute, and then crashes, with a Windows message that secretops.exe or standoff.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.
I've tried Win95 compatibility mode, Win98 compatibility mode, and no compatibility mode turned on; with full audio acceleration and with audio acceleration turned off; with both Standoff and Secret Ops installed, and with just Secret Ops; and all possible permutations of the above, and nothing works. I've also tried turning off my anti-virus program in case it's messing with anything. Still nothing works. Same symptoms every time. I've also tried changing the program to run with "D3D" video acceleration instead of the default, "software", and that didn't have any effect either.
For the record, my system has an ATI graphics card (not sure which one...whatever is built into a Dell Latitude C640), and I'm running DirectX 9c, which, when I run the dxdiag.exe diagnostics, claims everything is fine with my DirectX install.
The only other thing that may be (but probably is not) relevant is when I first did the install, and tried to change the video setting to either D3D or "software", from the launcher panel, I got an error message that "glide2x.dll" could not be found. At the suggestion of another CIC tech support thread, I found the file online and installed it, and now I don't get that error any more, but the program still doesn't work.
I've seen descriptions of what seem like similar problems in other threads searching through the CIC forums, but the solution always seems to be "enable compatibility mode and/or turn off audio acceleration". I've tried both of these things and neither works.
If anyone has any other suggestions of what to try, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm all out of ideas, and am kind of bummed because I really wanted to play Ep 4 of Standoff (and also, have never finished Secret Ops). I'm a little out of my element--I used to be quite computer savvy, but haven't been involved in troubleshooting Windows systems since about 1998 or so, and things seem to have changed slightly since then...
Especially with graphics cards and graphics engines. Of course, the problem may be graphics, sound, memory, or something else...I really have no clue...
