Trickos

Ok, it was soooooooooooooooo stupid (as usual) : I did not reset the WinXP date/time after installing, and the current year was 2082, which invalidate the windows update certificates, which causes the system not to take all the updates it needs on the MS site. I installed almost 41Mb of patches (among them was a nVidia driver update) and now the game is working fine (well it just crashed during a MP game but at least I can play). Thanks for your help.

[...] have you tried installing it on a different one? [...] Good one, I thought about that too but it changed nothing. I tried to reinstall in /Program Files/ of the system partition (usually not a good idea because of security settings but well...) and in another partition on the same drive than the system one. And seriously, I really cannot see any "good" reason for the game not working on a partition and not another (given that the access rights are ok). API/Abstraction layers are supposed to eliminate these kind of things. Another detail about my config: for historical reason the stupid Windows XP installer decided to name my system partition "D:" and not "C:" (because the boot loader/boot.ini of the previous OS were elsewhere and it obviously pick them back). And I know this can have some impact on badly coded softwares (this is why I won't suspect OFP to have any problem with it :-). What is really frustrating is not to have any error message. Nothing is logged (apart from the babbling in the Event Viewer). OFP does not generate any report. That's hard to debug.

Once upon a time, I was playing OFP-GOTY (Patched 1.91) on a: Duron 700Mhz 384 Mb SDRAM Asus A7V GeForce3 Ti200 64Mb (AGP) Sound Blaster PCI 128 3Com Ethernet 10/100 IDE hard drives + 1 CDR (LG) + 1 CDRW (Plextor 12/10/32A) Windows 2000 SP3 and it was good. In this time, I was naive and had never heard about CTDs, "Cannot Create 3D Device" stuff and all these subtle pleasure of OFP configuration. So, tired of wonderful MP games at 4 FPS with a 250 meters line of sight, I decided to upgrade the damn computer. Which changed into a: Athlon XP 2600+ 512Mb DDR Asus A7N8X-X (integrated Realtek-ACL650 soundcard + Network stuff I am not using + a wonderful NForce2 chipset) GeForce3 Ti200 64Mb (AGP) 3Com Ethernet 10/100 IDE hard drives + 1 CDR (LG) + 1 CDRW (Plextor 12/10/32A) Windows 2000 SP3 And OFP began to tell than it cannot "Create a fucking 3D Device" because it takes an out of memory exception, which was not cool. I ran DXDiag and DirectX was indeed broken. I tested every (nVidia Detonator Pack, DirectX, nForce2 drivers) combinations until the whole tests were running again. After that, the game kept stopping at the same point (blank screen before the CodeMasters logo), but instead of a DirectX dialog box I got 2 error messages in the Event Viewer (no message source found, inarticulate message, that's help). I started to browse this forum, in TroobleShooting and TroobleShooting FAQ++ sections, the Avon Lady FAQ, every message I can find on Google Groups talking about CTDs and crash before splash screen, and tried everything I found. Nothing worked so I assumed that the motherboard was too recent for Windows 2000 or the provided drivers were utterly broken. Which was probably not the case because the 3DMark2001Se ran perfectly as well as every other games I tried (Half-Life + CounterStrike, Medieval Total War) and every demomaking stuff I have been gathering for years. Nevertheless I decided that Windows XP might be good after all: Athlon XP 2600+ 512Mb DDR Asus A7N8X-X (integrated Realtek-ACL650 soundcard + Network stuff I am not using + a wonderful NForce2 chipset) GeForce3 Ti200 64Mb (AGP) 3Com Ethernet 10/100 IDE hard drives + 1 CDR (LG) + 1 CDRW (Plextor 12/10/32A) Windows XP SP1a And OFP is not running (same error than before). So, I post here with hope that some people might have the same config I have or know the magical trick which make the whole thing to work, at last. I am ready to retry every trick I already tried under Windows 2000, maybe I did them wrong who knows, just tell me and I would tell you if it works or not. Just a last minute hint: when I try to launch the game with my former installation (the one which was working the first time), it crashes after having displayed the CodeMaster logo. I comes from addons being loaded at this moment, and it crashes before the logo if I remove every addon. Thanks for any suggestion. PS: I just wonder what makes this game so different to cause these kinds of crashes where others, as much resource consuming, do not...