Black Screen - so frustrated...

[digety 0]

I installed Sacred 2 u.s. edition and then tricked my computer into installing the expansion Blood and Ice.

There was a nice write up on how to do it on the Sacred 2 forums and I followed the guide to the letter on 2 different computers. My laptop and my girlfriends desktop. One worked flawlessly, the other has a blackscreen after the loading. This is on my alienware laptop which runs windows 7, her desktop which loaded everything fine is using vista 64. I am pretty sure this is OS related.

 

Anyhow, when I first attempted to install the game on my laptop I did not know about the expansion existing. I ran the game fine on my laptop. Once I got the expansion I installed it over my US edition which was patched to 2.43. However this when loading the expansion was not letting me see text, so I did not know what clicking certain boxes was doing. This is what led me to finding the guide on the Sacred 2 forum. It's advice was to do a fresh install and patch to 2.40 and then install the expansion. Then it said: (WINDOWS 7 USERS ONLY) If you are using Windows 7, then you will want to install the 2.65.1.0 patch from this link. If you do not, you will not be able to play as the Dragon Mage, nor will your game save settings or be otherwise stable! This is an extremely important step if you are using Windows 7, so DO NOT SKIP IT.

The link for downloading this patch was down, but I found the patch elsewhere. Upon downloading it, I was not able to install the patch. It was saying that versions do not match etc. So in order to get this patch to work I could not have 2.43 already (hence the instructions saying 2.40) so I needed to reinstall. I reinstalled, patched to 2.40 and then applied this other patch for win7. I changed the folders, files from engUS to UK etc all like the guide said. Now when I load the game, after the initial loading, I get a black screen. I can still see my cursor and move it around but nothing else, I have to alt f4 to close it.

 

I am on a gaming alienware laptop that is less than a year old. I have updated my drivers for my video card, direct x, physx drivers, changed physx to cpu and even edited my icon exe on the desktop to try compatability mode and even add -skipopenal -nocpubinding. Nothing so far has worked.

 

I am at the end of my rope and I am about to give up. Someone please help.

[gogoblender 3,071]

Hi digety, and welcome to DarkMatters

I saw your post over on the SIF, and now here. I know for a while we were offering some advice on the "trick" ...but there was too much frustration and eventually for sanity's sake (mostly my own) we had to take it down.

 

I hope someone out there with some more wherewithal has a solution for you.

 

Cheers

 

 

gogo

[digety 0]

I can't believe it is this complicated to play a game on a good computer. This is just ridiculous. The amount of hoops one has to jump through. Well if you know some tricks can you point me in a direction?

[gogoblender 3,071]

Hi digety

 

Well, you're doing something outside the box...trying to make the EU product work with the American product...it wasn't designed for that.

 

I understand you read a guide that told you that someone knew how to "trick" the game...and this is what you are trying to do...trick the game.

 

I do hope you can get it to work...but it's not so black and white and it's not just a case of getting this game to work normally on a great system ^^

 

Good luck

 

 

gogo

[digety 0]

Actually it is easy and works fine on non windows 7 machines. I have done this a few times on vista already with no problems at all.

 

The game has serious flaws with physx and windows 7 compatabilities and there are tons of "please help me" threads to validate this. I just wish I knew if people actually got past this black screen issue.