posted 03-21-99 11:00 AM ET        

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Hello, I've read through a bunch of posts been disheartened to see the woes people are having. Will it never end? I too am having technical problems playing this game, I will detail them here. The more details we get into the greater the chances are that in the future games will run a little smoother or, as in my case, actually just... run.

My problem:
AC locks up. Sometimes it locks up at the Firaxis logo and when I hit ctrl-alt-delete (calling this CAD from now on) it tells me it stopped functioning, I 'end task' and it goes to a black screen from which I need to CAD out of, thus rebooting my machine.
Other times I freeze up during gameplay. I've never managed to actually play for more than 10 minutes or so before this happened. Again, I need to CAD out of this. Sometimes it'll take me back to the desktop, other times it'll just shaft me back into rebooting all the way. When this one happens I get stuttering sound that loops and loops and loops...

NOW... in my experience I have had a LOT of problems with 2D games. This is odd. I can run Everquest, Half-Life, Battlezone... but when it comes to Age of Empires, Fallout 2 and Starcraft I've had major grief. Crashes, lockups, you name it I got it.

I BELIEVE this is sound-related. I can play AoE without sound and I'm pretty sure I can play Alpha Centauri without sound. But I don't want to! I paid for a game, not a silent movie. The problem now is narrowing it down to WHAT particular sound woes are affecting me. Allow me to give you the details of my machine...

PII 400, 128 MB's SDRAM.
My Motherboard is a cheapo M729 from www.pcchips.com It has sound onboard. This is something I'm not familiar with, and I'm still not clear on how it works, but more on this later.
My video-card is a Creative Labs Graphic Blaster Riva TNT. I've had some problems with this, but not too many and right now I'm running the nVidia reference drivers (those Detonator ones...).
I've got DirectX 6.1 I'm running Win 98 with all the critical updates installed. Wireless keyboard and mouse, and all the rest is standard.

Another thing that leads me to think that my problems are sound-related is the following:
In my Control Panel there's a multimedia icon. Clicking that leads me to a box where I can choose different playback devices. I have all sorts of weird stuff in here, ranging from SB16 to System Sound to Game compatible Device... and more, more! When I choose different ones I get different types of crashes (I also get different results in DxDiag's DirectSound Tests), I've also experimented with hardware sound acceleration settings here, to no avail. Crash after crash after lockup.
I've tried different settings in the Alpha Centauri.ini file, but none have worked. Some make it crash harder, others make it work a while before crashing. Story of my life.
I've tried reinstalling it, I've tried different patch versions (2 and 3), I've tried installing them in different orders, or simply avoiding 2 and going for 3 after a clean, fresh install. I've tried with saved-games and new games. I've defragged and scandisced myself to a state of almost deadly boredom.
All this takes time, I haven't got too much of that, there's only so many times I can reboot over and over and over before my patience wears thin...
But all this is to no avail. I can't get this game to run properly and it's starting to frustrate me. I can live without Fallout and Starcraft and AoE... I can handle that, but Civ was such a great game and the little I've seen of this one looks so appealing that I REALLY want to fix my problems and get this friggin system working well with this game. Or vice-versa.
I know this isn't all Firaxis's fault, I know it's a combination of things - I have a cheapo motherboard, Microsoft's support and implementation of DirectX is pretty shameful, developers can't possibly cover ALL system configurations...
But that's all of no use to me. The bottom line is that this game ain't working. And I wish it was.
So here's my appeal, my call for help... Does ANYONE have any idea what the hell I could do to fix this?
Running it without sound is out of the question.
Getting a new motherboard and a REAL soundcard is also out of the question.
Returning the game is out of the question.
Dropping my system out of my window on top of a Microsoft exec's skull is... a tantalizing option.
But after that I'm stuck. Nowhere to turn to, and believe me when I say I feel a sense of deja vu because I've typed messages similar to this on countless forums and have never found any help. What motivated me to do so again is that other folks here seem to be having sound problems too.
Misery loves company
I'm outta town for 10 days so forgive any non-responses to any replies this message may get. But rest assured that when I get back one of my priorities will be to check this forum and see what's transpired. Good luck to all others who are having problems! Thanks in advance for any help!
Dud