NationStates Jolt Archive

I have the original Win 95 version of Crimson Skies on a few of my computers, but my graphics cards are too advanced for them or something. When I get ingame, the text is displayed as festive bars for some reason, and if I change the options to allow the text to be legible, the image becomes so pixilated as to be useless. Here are some screen shots of the problem:

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a210/Zipline/CS2.jpg

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a210/Zipline/CS1.jpg

The graphics card I use on both computers is an Nvidia 6500 (I believe). Interestingly, Wikipedia has this to say:

Although the budget re-release box-pack for Crimson Skies says that the game will not run under Windows XP, the game should run correctly on XP if the official Microsoft 1.02 patch is also installed. Players who still have problems, such as Direct X issues, can run Windows XP in a Win 98 "compatibility mode". As a last resort, the game can be run with software-rendered graphics at 640x480, rather than graphics-card rendering.

I’m pretty sure I have that patch, but I have no idea what a compatibility mode or software-rendered graphics is.

If you right click on the program icon and go to properties, there's a tab that says "Compatibility" and you can choose to run that program in compatibility mode for older versions of Windows.

Software renderer is when you tell the program to handle the graphics all by itself instead of passing them to the OS to give to the card. Of course, there's a performance hit for this, but in modern hardware that shouldn't be too noticeable for this game.

I get an error report every time I start the game now. I've tried it in both 98 and 95 versions, but neither works. Selecting the 650 x 480 (or something like that) resolution doesn't seem to make a difference.

I get an error report every time I start the game now. I've tried it in both 98 and 95 versions, but neither works. Selecting the 650 x 480 (or something like that) resolution doesn't seem to make a difference.

That's odd....compatibility mode basically emulates the settings you've selected.

Yea, it is strange. I went to mess with the compatability on my non-gaming machines and found it had been set to Windows 2000 as default for some reason. Didn't seem to make a difference; I got the same message either way, "Windows Has Encountered a Problem With Crimson Skies Executable."

How do you get to that software graphics rendering thing?

While this thread is up, I cannot seem to get Command and Conquer: Red Alert to run on my windows XP PC. Actually, the problem is in installing it, it tells me that I need to be running a Windows 95 PC for it to work, how do I overcome this?

Huh, that's weird. I played C&C: RA2 on XP just two days ago (maybe three). Perhaps there's a patch you need?

On Crimson Skies, I meddled a bit with the various visual settings, moving them from high to low and whatnot. A few of them created interesting effects (sharper image resolution, the festive glitch turning black, white, and pink) but there was no overall change.