A few questions. Did the trial version work for you?

Also, you say you have the latest drivers - have you gotten the nVidia drivers from www.nvidia.com instead of the ones specific for your card - sometimes they work better.

You could try turning down sound acceleration (or DirectSound) off in Windows as discussed in other threads here - that's worked for some people.

I've not tried the trial version. I'd download it to see if it works any differently, but I'm currently on dial-up, and that would take a bit of time...

As for the drivers, I did get them from nvidia.com, so I'm hoping they're the ones I need. Maybe in this case, the ones from Extasy may work differently...I might give them a try.

I did try knocking the sound acceleration down a notch, but I haven't tried knocking down the graphics acceleration yet. I didn't know if there's actually an in-game sequence directly after that logo or if it was just another WMA file. I'll give that a try next. I need to do a service pack update for XP, but I'm going to try it last, as I need to download about 24 megs worth of files and I wasn't sure it was related to the problem anyway...it looked like it just handled a lot of security issues.

Thanks for the response!

Hmmm. The drivers from Extasy are a longshot as reference drivers USUALLY work better/as well in almost all cases (at least in my experience), but it's a shot.

As far as what happens directly after the Microsoft movie sequences, there should be a short Digital Anvil movie sequence (at least in the trial version - I assume it's the same in the full). After that comes the main menu, which does seem to use the in-game engine.

Some things you might want to try (but unfortunately, you may have to download a lot to try them as painful as that'll be with dialup):
- First I'd try all options you can do without lengthy downloads like decreasing video performance/AGP speed, etc., though frankly I'm doubtful since that only seems to cause problems on ATI-based cards that I know of.
- Since it may be related to switching movie files, maybe try updating Windows Media Player (Version 9 was recently released).
- Possibly try grabbing DirectX 9, also recently released.
- Other Windows Updates like SP1 you mentioned.

Only other think I can think - maybe there's some sort of no movies string you can use when starting the game to stop it from playing them, but I don't know what it would be. I wonder if anyone does? (Nothing in the readme for the trial version).

Good luck to you!

Try disabling the movies...

*stole this from another thread...*
you can edit freelancer\exe\freelancer.ini:

replace

[Startup
movie_file = movies\MGS_Logo_Final.wmv
movie_file = movies\DA_Logo_Final.wmv
movie_file = movies\FL_Intro.wmv

with

[Startup
;movie_file = movies\MGS_Logo_Final.wmv
;movie_file = movies\DA_Logo_Final.wmv
;movie_file = movies\FL_Intro.wmv

I had similiar problems with unreal 2003 and c and c generals, I am running a amd 1800 + epox 8rda+ windows pro ati aiw 9700 pro 2 x 512 mb pc2700
I would boot up unreal and between 30 seconds and 2 minutes i would reboot or crash to the desktop and same thing with generals. I recently upgraded my system aand reformatted and updated Everything. I sent ati, epox, and nvidia emails and the only one that seemed to help was epox. They felt that the issue was bios related and told me to set my bios to optimize. I am not really sure exactly what it changed, but the one thing that i did notice is it slowed down my ram speed and everything worked fine. It seems that my problems were due to memory overwriting. No problems since. Maybe you should try something in your bios. if your not sure how to do it just ask or surf around. These newer games are very demanding and your probably using resources your computer never used before and therefore never noticed any bugs your system might have had. And i guess maybe i do not know a thing about what i am talking about, but i did get my system to work (this is directed towards people who know a lot more than i do and want to criticize wwhat i have said). I would try this out. Let me know if it works
Good Luck



understanding the past prepares you for the future http://www.moreorless.au.com/
be critical of your leaders and heroes

What VERSION of the nvidia drivers did you install? The absolute newest version available is NOT WHQL certified, and can cause instability. I've had issues with it and other games.

I had a little problem with it crashing during the opening but i figured out my problem. During the microsoft and Digital Anvil openings if i used the esc button to skip them the game would crash. but if i let them play through then use esc on the intro movie only then it worked fine. Have you been hitting the esc button to skip em when it crashed? cause if you are don't and see if it works.

________________________________

"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes.
When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours.
That's relativity."
- Albert Einstein

Thanks for all the responses...I just got home from work and haven't had a chance to try anything since my last post, but I'm in the midst of downloading some things to try, so I'll be playing with the thing in the next few hours to try and get it running...to answer some of the questions...

As far as the ESC key, I've tried it both ways...both letting it run and hitting ESC to skip it. It does the same thing each time.

I believe I did get the absolute newest Nvidia drivers, and I remember it saying that it wasn't WHQL certified. I may try rolling it back, but I had the same problem after as I did before, no better, no worse...but I'll keep it in mind as a possibility...I'm going to be trying out a whole bunch of things.

I'll try disabling the movies too...but first I'm going to update Windows Media...I have an early early early version 9, and the update may help it along. I'm in the process of downloading (which should only take about 4 or 5 months heehee) so after I try it, if it doesn't work, disabling the movies will be my next step...

As for altering BIOS, I wouldn't know the first thing about what to change to affect anything positively, so I'd have to do some research on that...I'll keep it on my list of things to research and try, but I've got some other things I think I'll try first.

Again, thanks for all the responses, I'll let you know how it goes.

Well, I disabled the movies after the WM update didn't work, and I'm now finally in the game...no biggie as there's only the logo movies and the intro and they're viewable in WM Player. Now I have to deal with the sound problem I've heard so much about in the other threads (most sounds in cutscenes gone, or completely gone). There are parts of this game that work, right? heeheehee

Thanks again everybody...cheers!

Aaah, I just killed two birds with one folder...i read the Read Me file and at its insistence, I removed the Nimo Codec pack and uninstalled Freelancer, and then installed the WMFDist.exe file from the REDIST folder on the CD-ROM. I then found a WMPCDCS8.exe file in that same folder that installed some MPEG codecs. After doing these things, the opening movies work fine, and the sound does as well.

I had the answers sitting in my CD tray the whole time...d'oh!