Wing Commander 4: Blank screen but....

  • Thread starter Thread starter Yak
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Yak

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Hi all,

first of alla I wanted everybody to know that after 10 yrs of search (didn't trust ebay) I was able to get a CD version of WC IV! In italy was pretty hard to find after the release and I'm too happy!
Yeah, too. Beacuse after a succesful playin 'till CD 4 I occured in a very strange problem:
when I start the game the screen goes blank and nothing happens! Even trying to boot the game with other CDs in has no result. The strange thing is that sound works and I can tell the whole program is active, because I can hear the mouse clicking on things (like the save games). As I said it was working before! Right now I just get this blank thing.

I'm running it with the W95 patch on XP Pro. I tried to run it normally and I could see the menus (tho I had bad audio and framerate quality). I tried to reinstall the patch too but had no luck! Can somebody help me out?

Thanks a lot!
 
Yak said:
I'm running it with the W95 patch on XP Pro. I tried to run it normally and I could see the menus (tho I had bad audio and framerate quality). I tried to reinstall the patch too but had no luck! Can somebody help me out?

Thanks a lot!
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Using the win95 patch is a good start. Have you also set the compatability mode? Right-click on the executable, click properties and then the compatability tab and set it to either win95 or 98. See if that helps before we go on to anything else... and a rundown of your system specs wouldn't hurt either.
 
thanks for the answer! Yes, that was my first shot but nothing happened. Has I sai it was working fine first it just stopped working on the video display...I guess it has something to do with a directdraw problem....even the video are not showing, just the audio is working....

As for my system:
AMD Athlon 2.6 ghz, 512 mb ram, Nvidia Geforce 4MX 64MB, HD 80gb, subdivided in two partitions....gotta say that windows' partition is low on memory but it's not the one in which WCIV is installed...

any ideas?
 
Yak said:
thanks for the answer! Yes, that was my first shot but nothing happened. Has I sai it was working fine first it just stopped working on the video display...I guess it has something to do with a directdraw problem....even the video are not showing, just the audio is working....

As for my system:
AMD Athlon 2.6 ghz, 512 mb ram, Nvidia Geforce 4MX 64MB, HD 80gb, subdivided in two partitions....gotta say that windows' partition is low on memory but it's not the one in which WCIV is installed...

any ideas?
Click to expand...


Are you using an LCD by any chance? There's the slight chance it doesnt like switching to that resolution. What happens if you try running the game in a window? It's also possibly a problem with older video drivers.
 
Yeah you are right I'm using an LCD. Infact I tried to reduce both colr depth and screen resolution, but I had no luc either. The fact is that if I run in dos mode I can see it clearly!

And as I said it was working before! I'm really puzzled!
 
Yak said:
Yeah you are right I'm using an LCD. Infact I tried to reduce both colr depth and screen resolution, but I had no luc either. The fact is that if I run in dos mode I can see it clearly!

And as I said it was working before! I'm really puzzled!
Click to expand...

Did you get it running in a window? Also Switching the screen res will not change anything if you keep running WC4 fullscreen because it switches to whatever WC4wants when you do that. There may be adjustments that you have to make on your monitor itself to force it to upconvert the signal to whatever the native resolution of your monitor is. I'm not an expert on LCDs though so thats about all I can suggest about that.
 
Well, I can't run it into a window if I use w95 patch rite? I'm just intrested to make it wor with the patch, bacuase in other way I get the view but get horrible sound too!

Anyway thanks for the help AD I really appriciate that!
 
YaK said:
Well, I can't run it into a window if I use w95 patch rite? I'm just intrested to make it wor with the patch, bacuase in other way I get the view but get horrible sound too!

Anyway thanks for the help AD I really appriciate that!
Click to expand...


It does run windowed with the win95 patch. Press Alt+Enter when in the game and it should be then running in a window
 
You can try running it in a DOSBox window as well. Have you tried reinstalling the whole game and running a scandisk? It's possible something got corrupted.

Yak said:
first of alla I wanted everybody to know that after 10 yrs of search (didn't trust ebay) I was able to get a CD version of WC IV! In italy was pretty hard to find after the release and I'm too happy!
Click to expand...

After a few years of searching, I'd probably just take the chance and send $10-20 to some ebay person and see what happened.
 
First of all: I solved the problem guys, the vsync if my screen went out of business.

Chris, I suppose you're american...You see, In Italy there is not a lot of confidence in ecommerce (unfortunately), and the beloved wing commander 4 is a game title the no one in ebay Italia has got. Moreover it wasn't a full 10 yrs search, but I always hoped to find somewhere in its italian version and with its proper box.

If I wanted the game "as it is" I could have downloaded it from the net! But that wouldn't be a great behaviour torwards the WC community, don't you think?
 
Yak said:
First of all: I solved the problem guys, the vsync if my screen went out of business.

Chris, I suppose you're american...You see, In Italy there is not a lot of confidence in ecommerce (unfortunately), and the beloved wing commander 4 is a game title the no one in ebay Italia has got. Moreover it wasn't a full 10 yrs search, but I always hoped to find somewhere in its italian version and with its proper box.
Click to expand...

There's a lot of stuff that comes and goes. Things might not be there today, and there could be several of a particular item next month. You said in your original post that you didn't *trust* eBay though, not that you put time into searching for it online and came up empty.

Yak said:
If I wanted the game "as it is" I could have downloaded it from the net! But that wouldn't be a great behaviour torwards the WC community, don't you think?
Click to expand...

Well, I'd think you'd have an even harder search finding a 4 gigabyte game from 1996, but if you read the CZ Rules here, going into the details of that is not allowed.
 
ChrisReid said:
Well, I'd think you'd have an even harder search finding a 4 gigabyte game from 1996, but if you read the CZ Rules here, going into the details of that is not allowed.
Click to expand...

I thought the size of the game was 11mb
 
ChrisReid said:
There's a lot of stuff that comes and goes. Things might not be there today, and there could be several of a particular item next month. You said in your original post that you didn't *trust* eBay though, not that you put time into searching for it online and came up empty.



Well, I'd think you'd have an even harder search finding a 4 gigabyte game from 1996, but if you read the CZ Rules here, going into the details of that is not allowed.
Click to expand...

It does but not the italian version. About trusting or not matter: I do trust ebay, but in italy there has been many guys who recived many and sent nothing.

As for the downloading thing which I'm really not willing to do, I invite you to take a look to a very know download program....e-#### (guess you know what program I'm talking about). You'll find out every CD is esaily downloadable in almost no time (4 days at maximum)
 
Oh, and by the way I came here to solve a problem, not to have my intention processed...I thought everybody's welcome in a community. Maybe I'm wrong.
 
That's stupid, if you weren't welcome, people wouldn't even bother replying to you initial post.
 
Yak said:
Oh, and by the way I came here to solve a problem, not to have my intention processed...I thought everybody's welcome in a community. Maybe I'm wrong.
Click to expand...

No, as I mentioned earlier, if you read the forum rules, people who discuss ways to pirate WC games are not welcome. You were the one that brought that up though. Nobody here questioned your intentions. And prior to mentioning that, there's a whole series of posts where people are trying to help you with your problem. I don't understand how you could feel wronged here.

I have seen WC4 on various services, and they've all been horrible rips with the video removed (what the hell?) and stuff like that. They don't work well either. There's a bunch of common tech support questions people ask here that automatically red flags them as having downloaded a broken copy of a certain game.
 
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