Well I have given up and done what I should probably have done in the first place. I have bought another gfx card, this time a Radeon 9700 Pro - and it is superb. I have had no problems at all and it makes Freelancer look even better with full levels of AA and AF turned on. Oh and of course it runs silky smooth. Shame about wasting a 100 quid on the GFX5200 though

THIS should be the solution to the monitor shutting down.
When i had my old geforce ddr, and after installing new drivers, I got exactly the same problem you describe, here is the complete correct way to update geforce drivers..
1/ Goto control panel and add/remove programs, uninstall Nvidia drivers, But don't restart, Use Detonator destroyer (do a search in a search engine to get it) to remove any stray nvidia .inf's, Then go into search and look for any file called "nv", by right clicking on them and opening in notepad you can verify they are really nvidia drivers, Delete all nvidia entries found..
2/ restart your pc, when windows restarts and detects your hardware and prompts for drivers, Install your card as a vga adapter, Then restart.
3/ Upon restarting, update the vga card to your real geforce card with whatever drivers your using, THEN before resarting go into display properties, settings, advanced, then in XP goto monitor and change your refresh rate to one you know your monitor supports, i.e 75hz OR in win98 goto "adapter" and change to "adapter default" for the refresh rate.
Restart and hopefully all will be well.
The reason your monitor is shutting down is because the refresh rate is set to a speed that the monitor does'nt support.
If after all this you still have problems another possible fix is to go to start, programs, accessories, system tools, system information, Go to tools Direct X and in the end more help box (or troubleshoot), look for a setting to overide your directdraw refresh rate, Set this to your required refresh rate, i.e. 75hz, then press ok and it should be ok then and stop your monitor going into standby when you start a game, whether it be FL or any other game.
Hope this helps.

"Stop the world! I wanna get off !"

I'm getting the same problem on my GeForce FX 5200. Reinstalled the latest detonators, reinstalled DirectX, but still it locks up... I'm getting those problems...

- No textures appearing in-game (except for the sky), however it works fine on the main menu or in the first in-game movie (which is as far as I can get >_>
- Crashing to a (100% stuck) black screen when I try to change the resolution
- Simply hanging after a while.

I'm quite sure that the refresh rate is set correctly (my monitor only seems to support 60 Hz).

[edit

- Made sure that the refresh rate is set correctly (default windows method and by overriding it in dxdiag).
- installed the latest drivers for my VIA chipset
- reinstalled the game like 5x.

Still nothing...

Edited by - DarkHydra on 24-06-2003 22:38:07

Edited by - DarkHydra on 25-06-2003 00:10:27

Edited by - DarkHydra on 25-06-2003 00:15:44

Could you please post your full pc specs and what OS your using plus any additional info you can too, It maybe that your m/board or soundcard has a blatant issue with the fx 5200, Only by providing these things can we help to diagnose fixes for hardware issues.


"Stop the world! I wanna get off !"

AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1400 mHz)
ASUS a7v266 VIA kT266 motherboard
ASUS GeforceFX 5200
Creative AudioPCI Soundblaster
512 MB DDR RAM
Using Windows XP Home edition, latest WHQL detonator drivers, and DirectX 9.0a.

Freelancer crashes to a black screen if I try to change the resolution (however changing it manually in PerfOptions.ini seems to work fine).
It simply hangs if I click Options or Load Game in the ingame menu, or whenever I have to do something ingame (eg. go to the bar or talk to that woman in the bar. Didn't even get to any flying yet.).

Edited by - DarkHydra on 25-06-2003 23:16:54

Its probably the vid card that has some rather amusing conflicts with the game. Atleast make sure that the card is compatible with the game as well. Theres a comptuer in PCGamer issue #112, July 2003 that has a beta board (drivers beta as well, soon to be released) GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. IF you somehow got that board, it might not work right with the game.

"In space, no one can hear you yell YEHAW - Only your coworkers frowning at you."

It would seem that the 5200 cards are causing some annoying problems, so I can only suggest a few things, One is to go into the bios and change the agp speed to 4x or even 2x, Also check your memory settings too, changing your cas setting to 3 from 2 or 2.5 could help to make your system more stable.
Also you could try browsing this forum.... www.madonion.com you will have to register to post in the forums but thats a five minute process, The guys in hear are serious tech heads, who think nothing of using liquid nitrogen to cool processors, So if the solution to all your problems ain't here then the solution probably does'nt exist.

"Stop the world! I wanna get off !"

Changing AGP to 4x / 2x would be a good idea, I think. I'll try it once I finished an other problem... a cd-rom exploded in my cd-rom drive.

It's completely fixed with 2x AGP. Thanks, oni!

my system:
AMD 800
640MB ram
GeForce FX 5200
SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer

i was getting the black screen/bsod lock up on game start problem too, but after two weeks of screwing with it with advice from m$ web support, tried disabling the sound card. now the first time i start the game i get a bsod with no system lock up, then restart the game immediately and it runs. with no sound, but better than not running at all.
will try bouncing the video card down to 2x in bios though, hadn't tried that yet..

-trav

I too had an MX440 and changed it for an FX5200, I too got black screen and lock-up. Win98se, 512mb DDR, P4-2.4 etc etc.

It's not DX9/DX9a that does it.

It's not WHQL no-certified that does it.

It's not the m/b chipset and GART drivers that do it.

It's Nvidia's rubbish drivers. I used the drivers that came with the card, failed. I got the latest off Nvidia's site, failed. I used an older 41.09 reference driver, worked perfectly! But you have to un-install ALL traces of the previous drivers including deleting the dir's after you've run the uninstall, then when it re-detects your card on startup, make sure you allow it to detect as "standard PCI-VGA adapter" then run the setup from the 41.09 unpack.

This also works for the 43.45 drivers but you have less control over the "tweak" options.

IMHO these are the last drivers Nvidia supplied that actually work, I wish they'd get their act together on this.

..you think you're done with the past; but the past isn't done with you..

Really sorry to ressurect this old thread.

My room mate has been watching me play FL for a while and went out and bought a used computer. It's a P3 933mhz w/ 256 megs and the GeForce 5200 FX. Freelancer, of course, doesn't work.

I thought at first it was a sound card problem, so we took out his card (Soundblaster PCI 128) but the game still crashed all the time. Sometimes we can get into the game, others times not at all.

So I followed Taw's advice about getting an older Nvidia driver, getting 41.09 except that the 5200 doesn't show up in the list of cards you can install. I'm not really sure what to do. I told it my card was an MX 400, but I don't think that's really going to work. Any ideas on how I can get an old driver to work on a recent card? Has anyone else got this card working with this game? What drivers are you using?

Interestingly, I have gotten the game to work with the FX5200, but in a very different way. I have an FX5600 XT, and we swapped cards for fun, to see if the card really was the problem. In my computer the game runs fine with it, I haven't had any degradation in performance or anything, we're playing two player LAN with Evolutions (the newest one), I'm hosting and playing from the same computer, and he's playing from his. We both have WINXP Pro, but he has SP1 installed and I don't, leading me to believe perhaps that is the problem. Regardless, I want my (hot) card back, and so I think we're going to trade his 5200 for a Radeon. Any recommendations (apart from the obviously hot newest one, which is unaffordable to us)? I'm going to try reinstalling winxp without sp1 to see if it helps first though.