Jedi Academy - 'elp!

wombat

I'm running Jedi Academy on Win98 SE with 512MB RAM, I'm using a supported graphics card and everything passes on the diagnosis thing but whenever I play I'm lucky to get more than 20 minutes before the whole thing freezes and my default windows mouse pointer appears on the screen, sometimes I can move it, sometimes I can't but regardless I can't ALT Tab out or do anything except hit reset. This one is especially bad on the droid retrieval mission early on but happens all over the place.

I've updated the graphic drivers to the newest versions, the sound card too, then I tried some older, supposedly more stable ones, I tried DirectX 9.0, 9.0a, 9.0b. I tried stopping all my services like antivirus and firewall and stuff and I just completly reinstalled windows and all of the above from scratch and still the stupid thing keeps crashing out.

Anyone else encountered this?

The lucasarts support department are being very quiet at the mo, I asked about this last thursday and there's still no reply. I can't find anything about it on the web either.

feylya

Perhaps your computer is over heating. What spec is it?

wombat

If I recall correctly it's a 2GhZ athlon, 512MB RAM (forget what type exactly, hardware is not my thing exactly but it was the best I could get a year ago) GeForce MX 460, SoundBlaster Pro PCI 128, 40GB hard disk.

According to my hardware doctor thingy the CPU is at about 57/58 degrees, system is at around 35 (where the low limits are 70 and 60 respectively)

For that matter, I just installed hitman 2 a minute ago and it tells me "Direct 3D: Unable to create device. Try changing resolution of color depth" whenever I try to run it. I got this before reinstalling windows too. The bugger of it is, Hitman 2 used to work a few months back, Dark Age of Camelot gave me similar problems last week but I'd played it without problem about a fortnight ago.

Coincidence I'm sure, but the whole thing went spare after installing Jedi Academy on thursday.

wombat

my mistake, 70 and 60 were the HIGH limits.

shinzon

im only guessing here, but would you by any chance have a via chipset running any version of the hyperion drivers, because ive had that exact same problem with jedi academy.

if you do have a via chipset then download the hyperion 4.43 version of the drivers because now i have no probs at all

shin

Captain Trips

And also get up to date NVidia drivers. Would happen if you were using say DX only and never installed newest drivers. I think.

wombat

Jeez, even IE is acting the maggot now.

I have the latest drivers and some poking around in directX diagnosis reveals that it fails all the direct3D tests. These all passed on the much older drivers that came with the card but obviously those ones aren't much cop for running the games on.

As for the chipset, 'scuse my ignorance here but are we talking CPU (AMD) here or the chipset on the card? (damned if I know)

I am a little puzzled and being largely clueless isn't helping

shinzon

ok just go into your device manager in control panel> system> device manager or if its win xp, the same except click on hardware then device manager, scroll down to your usb ports and youll see a name on them. something like Via or Sis or something

Anyhoo report back

Shin

conor-mr2

Could be directx itself. I would have stuck with an older directx like 8 if possible.
Having said that its difficult to uninstall directx to put another version on.

wombat

Okay, an update:
The chipset is via alright, I installed the newest drivers (released about ten days ago it seems)
I put the drivers to the most recent, stable versions according to guru3d.com. Now, until I installed the via drivers the direct3D stuff would not work on any graphics driver after the oldest ones I have.
So it would seem that my chipset and graphics card are bang on and I've not seen dxdiag complaining about anything so far and it appears to pass all tests in there but Jedi Academy still crashes, though this time the graphics are a bit more jagged and choppy (Z axis problem?) which might indicate a different root now - I had similar problems with Soul Reaver a wee while back.

Hitman 2 still won't run, except now instead of an error message it just goes back to desktop but my program bar is moved a few inches up the screen.

It's all a bit wierd, maybe it IS time to upgrade to Win2K

wombat

Originally posted by Conor-Mr2
Could be directx itself. I would have stuck with an older directx like 8 if possible.
Having said that its difficult to uninstall directx to put another version on.

Jedi Academy demands DX9.0 minimum, all reports on 9.0b were good so I figured there was no harm - and in fairness, performance has improved for the few moments anything runs.

shinzon

Originally posted by wombat
Jedi Academy demands DX9.0 minimum, all reports on 9.0b were good so I figured there was no harm - and in fairness, performance has improved for the few moments anything runs.

I thought that was the problem alright, have you got an nvidia based graphics card if you do then this is what you do, forget about the nvidia drivers 45.23, get version 44.03, whatever version of the hyperion drivers you got uninstall them, and put on version 4.43, root around guru3d and youll find them.

I must warn you though that this still might not work, the via hyperion drivers bury themselves deep in the registry and the only way i found to get rid of them totally is to completely reformat the drive

Shin

Tusky

ive had even worse problems with jedi academy .. so much so that i stoped playing it !

After i play and then shutdown the pc and go to play again , I cant see any of the menus etc , cant load games or anything

im running

amd athlon 1800 xp+
512 mb pc2100 ram
gf 4 ti4200 64 mb
windows xp

when i reinstall the game it works grand BUT after i stop playing and restart same prob happens again...

any ideas ?

wombat

Originally posted by shinzon

I must warn you though that this still might not work, the via hyperion drivers bury themselves deep in the registry and the only way i found to get rid of them totally is to completely reformat the drive

Shin

I'm pretty much resigned to having to reformat again at this stage to my knowledge I am running the 44.03 NVidia drivers but I can't be sure, not at all certain about the VIA version for that matter. I'm told the detonator destroyer clears out the drivers pretty well but I'm doubtful.

Still, I'll give that a go, if it doesn't work then I'll come back and call you names Ta very much.

wombat

Originally posted by Tusky

when i reinstall the game it works grand BUT after i stop playing and restart same prob happens again...

any ideas ?

That was more or less the first problem I had with the game myself, I'm pretty sure I solved it by upgrading my graphics drivers. Basically either nothing would start, or I'd hit "single player" and then nothing would start.

Then of course all the other crap started happening.

Tusky

ive allready updated my drivers ! Its mighty anoying

wombat

Originally posted by Tusky
ive allready updated my drivers ! Its mighty anoying

You're telling me. I got things working for a while. The solutions given by everyone here (Shinzon in particular, cheers ) worked for Hitman 2 and Soldier of Fortune 2, which I was sort of using as benchmarks after a little tweaking (turning down sound acceleration for SoF2 and tweaking the ini file for hitman 2).
JK:JA worked fine for a while then crashed twice with jasp.exe fatal errors and then went right back to its old tricks of crashing with no option but to reset. By this stage I can move about four strides forward, hear one sandraider grunt and then that's all folks (I installed everything as per Shinzon's instructions above).

I figure at this stage it's time to send lucasarts another mail and just put it to one side for a while. Judging from the searches I've done there are a huge number of people with this problem out there so I suspect/feverently hope there's a patch involved.

shinzon

yeah i was getting the jedi academy caused an invalid page fault in jamp.exe for awhile there when i first installed the game, but tis gone away now.

the only other thing i did as regards my system was update the sound card drivers.

I have a realtek ac97 onboard sound card, i had awful trouble with mafia until i updated the drivers for the realtek card.

you could try updating the sound drivers but i think you mentioned that you already did that.

If its a soundblaster live card then your in deep doo doo, from what i read its nearly impossible to get those working correctly with via chipsets


Shin

wombat

ah soundcards aren't the most expensive thing in the world to get replaced, irritating as it might be. I'm going to wait for the lucasarts reply (if any) before I bother doing anything more.

Soldier of Fortune 2 is keeping me occupied anyway, there may be no lightsabers in it but the wonderfully disgraceful amounts of gore in SoF make for good stress relief. Plus I manage to rip off more arms in SoF than JA anyway.

...

that sounded a lot more disturbing than I intended on reflection.