WCP video problems w/ 98 or XP

E

Ecthelion

Spaceman
I see a lot of posts on here about Wing Commander Prophecy video stuttering/skipping under Windows XP, but I am encountering it under Windows 98 as well. I have tried disabling sound acceleration in DXdiag but to no avail. As of now, the game does the same stuttering no matter which OS I install and run it under (I'm dual booting).

My specs are:
AMD AthlonXP 1800+ running at 1.1GHz (underclocked)
256MB DDR RAM
16X Pioneer DVD-ROM drive
SB Audigy
GeForce4 TI 4200 w/ 128MB RAM
Windows 98SE

As soon as I get home I'll add the version of DirectX I'm running under 98. Oh, and I don't believe I've updated Windows at all.

Any tips / help would be greatly appreciated.
 
I'm not SURE, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the problem. Final Fantasy 7 PC, for example (another DirectX 5-game, 1997 or so), doesn't work very well under DX8. I have a nagging suspicion that Starlancer isn't entirely comfortable in DX8 either... or I could just have used screwy video-card drivers back then. Who knows.

Hm... *Gets a nutty idea* Have you also tried disabling hardware acceleration for the GeForce 4?
 
Hm... *Gets a nutty idea* Have you also tried disabling hardware acceleration for the GeForce 4? [/B]
Click to expand...

I haven't tried disabling hardware acceleration. Do you mean going into DXDiag and disabling Direct3D Acceleration under the Display tab? Something tells me that would probably prevent me from playing Prophecy in Direct3D mode.
 
Interesting update to my Prophecy problem:

I tried installing it to my other computer, which is a Windows XP machine with a P3 600 with 384MB RAM, Ensoniq AudioPCI soundcard, GeForce2 MX, and HP 4x4x24 CDRW drive. The same problems occured with the videos (with or without sound acceleration). However, I had one more thing to try. This computer also had a Soundblaster 16 and I used it to play WC3 in DOS mode (using a boot disk) - WC3 didn't work on my Athlon even with slowdown utilities so I have concluded WC3 will not work on Athlon XP's at least. I added the SB16 to my hardware devices in Windows (wasn't detected, being an old pre-plug-and-play ISA device) and switched the sound card Windows used to the SB16, and tried the game again. The videos don't skip badly anymore, but the playback pauses occasionally for a split second, which may be due to my CDRW drive - in WC3 I had to eject and reinsert the CD at the end of every NAV point to make sure the video would play at the beginning of the next one, if it had video (the drive apparently spins down after a while and WC3 didn't give it enough time to spin back up when it tried to spool data). I'm going to finish WC4 before playing Prophecy through and I will probably try to move the SB16 over to my primary machine, the Athlon. Hopefully then everything will work fine. I don't know if my little WCP problem will help anyone else, but it seems the video problems that are common with the game are caused by the sound card somehow. Funny since WC3 in DOS and WC4 in Windows had no problems with video at all. Oh well, I guess it was just a sloppy video/sound engine.
 
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