Star Wars: Battlefront Video Problem
By: Avery R. Davis
Copyright (C) 2004 by Avery
R. Davis
It has been along time
since a game has given me this much trouble getting it to run. The installation
wizard seemed to run just fine, and the update of DirectX to 9.0c from the
installation CD also seemed fine, but when I tried to run the program, it would
freeze at the last splash screen. I was able to CAD and get back to Task
Manager to kill the program. Looking at the LucasArts website, the best
recommendation seemed to be to uninstall and reinstall. I decided to try
something easier first. I looked at the nVidia website for new video drivers,
but I already had the latest installed. Then I decided to distrust the DirectX
upgrade that came on the CD-ROM with the game. After I ran the DirectX 9.0c
upgrade I downloaded from Microsoft, the game came up and seemed to run OK.
Next, I tried to run the
game with my Belkin Nostromo SpeedPad n52, and this gave a BSD crash. Again, I
tried something easy and downloaded upgraded driver software from Belkin, and
that fixed the problem. SWBF did come up and run without crashing.
SW:BF was still finicky on
my gaming machine. When I tried to start it, I would get snow on the opening
splash screens, and sometimes it locked up. I could still CAD to Task Manager,
but I had to reboot to get the PC to act right. Frequently once SW:BF made it
past the splash screens I would get scrambled fonts (illegible characters and
invisible mouse cursor) on the profile screen, but sometimes I would get Blue
Screen of Death system stop. Usually,
the second or third time I tried to run it, SW:BF would come up without
scrambled fonts, and at that point it would always run just fine. These problems seemed to be related to what
other activity I had had on the PC before trying to run SW:BF. It sometimes ran
fine on a recent bootup.
This PC is also used for "office productivity" & etc., so there
are a lot of "Startup" applications. Here are some specs on this PC:
MB: Asus A7NX8 Deluxe
(nVidia nForce2)
CPU: AMD Athlon XP Barton 2500+
Memory: 1GB PC2700
Video: PNY Verto GeForce 6800 128MB
OS: Windows XP SP1
This PC maintains good
framerates with high video quality.
Interestingly, my old computer
does not have this problem and plays with decent frame rates at medium quality.
Here are the specs on this PC:
Compaq Deskpro EN (i815)
CPU: iPIII 1.0GHz
Memory: 256MB PC133
Video: PNY Verto GeForce Ti4200 64MB
OS: Windows 2000 (whatever the latest SP is).
A
solution is found:
I loaded the new nVidia
driver, version 66.93, and now SW:BF loads and runs just fine. Man, I wish I
had had this a few weeks ago at TusLAN2004. When I
wanted to play SW:BF, I typically had to make three tries to get it to load.
After installing the 66.93 driver, it loads without any snow or distortion on
the splash screens, and the profile screen is right the first try. After
running SW:BF several times, it always loads correctly. I will update this if
it screws up the next time I try to play it.
The moral of this story is
that the latest games frequently require the latest driver version, or even a
driver version that comes out some time after the game is released.
Here are some links for more
information on the SW:BF, nVidia and DirectX: