Well I've looked around here and other places for a few days for a solution to this, but none of them have worked. Here's my problem.
Quite some time ago, my brother bought the OFP GOTY edition. I already had my Gold Edition (OFP + Red Hammer) installed, so I simply installed the GOTY edition in a different directory, so I could continue playing my version (I have an attachment to it) with my saves, and my brother could play his.
The two games worked fine side-by-side like that for ages. A few months ago, though, I stopped playing Flashpoint (only temporarily, of course) because I had gotten a couple of games and was preoccupied with them. A couple of days ago when I went to fire up my Gold version of Flashpoint, I found that it didn't start.
What happens is, the splash banner comes up, the CD starts spinning just like it's going to play, but it remains at the desktop, and eventually the CD stops spinning.
I gave the GOTY edition a try, and it actually worked fine. But I want mine.
Naturally, clean installs fix everything. So I uninstalled both Flashpoints - my Gold and my brother's GOTY - and reinstalled my version on its own. After installing the original Flashpoint successfully, I put the Gold Upgrade CD in, and it did exactly the same thing as the game, minus a splash screen. I went into the CD directory and ran the setup directly, but again the CD spins up but then does nothing. I tried running the 'bare minimum' Flashpoint but I get the same thing as before.
So at this moment I've only got the very original Flashpoint installed, but not working. I expect that whatever is causing the problem with the game is causing a problem with the Gold install, so the solution is probably the same.
I searched around these forums a lot (using the search function and manually flipping through the pages) but no one seemed to have this same problem as me. I did find a page on the Avon Lady's website that looked helpful. I followed the advice there, got the latest video drivers, and enabled Auto-Insert Notification (through regedit, as Win XP does not have the simple solution used there). But I'm still left with the same problem.
I used the -nomap and -nosplash shortcut command line additions for the hell of it, even though I don't have v1.96 or the problems associated with those two solutions. But they didn't work either.
This image gives you a good idea of what's going on when I try to start the game. You can see the splash banner, and a box on the taskbar, and that Operation Flashpoint is actually listed in the processes list. But seconds later, it disappears along with the splash image, and shortly after that, the CD stops spinning in the drive.
Maybe it has something to do with how I had two versions installed, but they ran fine independently of each other for months before this. Also, uninstalling them both and reinstalling just the one should've fixed this, if it was the problem.
I suspect it might be something like a CD verification check failure, that the CD isn't being recognised as the one that matches the game. That sounds most likely to me. But wouldn't a clean install have fixed this also? There were no problems with the CD key when I entered it.
So, that's the problem I have, and what I've tried so far. I've tried to give you as much information as possible. Here are my main system specs and, for what it's worth, the contents of my Flashpoint.cfg file. That's probably irrelevent, but I thought I'd put it in just in case. If there's any more information you need, just tell me. Hope you can help.
