Sacred Gold on netbooks

[Zenon 0]

Hi everybody

 

I'm writing this post on my new pc, a Dell Mini Inspiron 9, which is a "netbook". It works fine and all, and it allows me to play (which got me pleasantly surprised) quite a lot of not-so-new games.

I'm fully aware of its capabilities and limitations, and having previously played on it all the Blizzard games released as of now (they don't need the cd anymore) without a problem, I confidently plugged my external usb dvd unit and threw in My Precious Sacred Disk (). Installation went fine, but then came the nasty surprise: I clicked on the icon and it immediately quit back to desktop. No problem, just a few changes to the settings. Also made sure that the Mini 9 meets the minimum requirements. It does. Clicked on icon, nope, it kept quitting. Was losing my patience, so I checked the error log, which left me as clueless as before. A-ah, it may be the resolution, so I switched to windowed mode. Needless to say, it didn't work. Set everything at the lowest possible quality, and tried again in both fullscreen and windowed mode. Nope. Now, to help you understand my feelings, it may help to tell you that I'm a few exams away from becoming a computer engineer, and I was raised by a mechanical engineer (my father). I first used a pc when 6 years old. Then, it may be easy to imagine just how much I hate things that are broken, or simply don't want to work, or a combination of the two. Therefore, I cleared the error log and began a whole new cycle of tests, aided by my desktop pc, in order to "gain valuable data", as I like to call it (the same as "achieving failures", but it sounds better). This time the log gave me some useful data, for example it kindly informed me that the game resolution is fixed at 1024x768. My screen has a native resolution of 1024x600. But the problem must be something else, it must be deep inside the game graphics mechanics. I know this because no piece of software has ever given me problems of this kind so far, game or not, whatever resolution it was set to. My conclusion is that it must have something to do with non-standard DirectX calls, something that my vga seems to hate very much. This happened three days ago. After that I removed the game 'cause I needed space, and began to bear hard feelings toward the Sacred dev team. Since I'm still young and don't want to take the bad habit of giving up on things, I'm going to give it another try. Eventually I'll succeed, and after the Mini I'll try to make it work on the other netbooks out there. In the meanwhile, let's concentrate on the first step.

 

So, if you have a netbook and want to play Sacred on it, keep an eye on this thread!

If you already succeeded in this task please post brand, model, problems encountered and method used to circumvent/solve them, and game performance on your netbook.

If you have ideas or suggestion, please post them!

It may also help if you post your error logs and DxDiag (more on this in a post below).

 

I'll keep updating this post as I (hopefully "we") get closer to the goal and find something worth reporting.

 

 

Ok, this is what we know by now:

 

• Game resolution is fixed at 1024 x 768.
  
• This may prevent the game to run on systems with lower native resolutions, although it may not be what causes the game to crash.
  
• The game crashes at start.
  
• Oddly enough, Sacred is listed as compatible with Intel gma 950. Take a look here.
  
• Turning off movies doesn't help (thanks to thek).
  
• Nothing useful in the registry (thanks to plastique_exploda).
  
• Switching to windowed mode doesn't help.
  
• Using the configuration utility doesn't help.
  
• Meddling with the settings.cfg file doesn't help.
  
• I like pie.
  
• Game version doesn't influence the problem.
  
• Neither does Windows version (at least not under Windows XP).
  

 

Thanks in advance to everyone provides advice and/or useful info!

 

Edit: corrected two or three little grammatical errors. Also updated with new findings.

 

Zen

Edited February 10, 2009 by Zenon

[thek 0]

Sad to say, but in this game resolution IS a real problem. Game is working only with this fixed resolution. Sometimes you can start game in different, but it's rare and it is a huuuuuuuuuuge luck. Problem is also in a ratio. When you have panoramic display it also won't start and only way to play is switch in that case to window mode. You may have even few times better configuration than needed, but you cannod win with fixed resolution :/ I was playing Sacred on many desktps, laptops and 95% of problems was solved by switching off movies (problem withdifferent version of wmv codecs) or switching to window mode. Lasting 5% graphic problems was caused by drivers, but not very often. In your case I'm more than sure, that resolution is involved.

[plastique_exploda 0]

Have you tired looking on the registry settings for sacred? Would be something like HKEY\CurrentUSER\Software\Sacred (Taking a stab in the dark) and looking for resolution settings in there and modifying them?

 

I have seen stranger things occur and the registry is after all a database for software and hardware settings try and push it to force your settings maybe it might be stupid enough to fall for it.

 

EDIT: Also Reading thek's Post there might be a setting in the registry to play movies it will most likely be a 1 change it to a 0 and that should turn movies off

 

again this is a long shot but worth a try

Edited February 10, 2009 by plastique_exploda

[Zenon 0]

@thek: switching to windowed mode doesn't solve anything, as I said in the first post. Tried to turn off movies as you suggested, but nope.

 

@plastique_exploda: another good idea like thek's one. I originally discarded it, 'cause after seeing the resolution was fixed, I didn't think I could have found something useful in there. Took a look anyway, after your suggestion, but still there is nothing that makes me think a change to it could affect the resolution.

The setting you must be referring to is located in the settings.cfg file, located in the game's directory. You can also change it through the Sacred configuration application.

 

UPDATE:

 

Went on an "installation spree" tonight, and mounted different Sacred versions on different operative systems, respectively Sacred vanilla (yes I have this one), Sacred 1.6, Sacred Plus, Sacred Underworld vanilla, Sacred Underworld 2.28 on Windows Xp service pack 2 and Windows XP service pack 3. None of those worked so far.

 

ABOUT DXDIAG AND ERROR LOG:

 

The error log is located in the game directory.

 

To generate a DxDiag log file go to the start menu, select "Run..." and type "dxdiag" (without quotation marks), click ok. Run the various test and then click on "Save All Information", then choose where you want the file to be saved.

 

Later today I'll try meddling with AsTray and programs like that...

 

First post updated to reflect changes.

 

Zen

Edited February 10, 2009 by Zenon

[aquamann 0]

I am running Sacred Gold on my acer one-it has everything to do with the resolution.I stumbled onto this answer at http://www.myasuseee.com/increase-your-scr...windows-7-hack/ after an unsuccessful hunt for an acer utility.

 

Here's what you do-- Type in Win+R and put ‘regedit’ (without the quotes) into the box.

- Search for ‘Display1_DownScalingSupported’ and change the value from ‘0′ to ‘1′

 

Then you need to restart your computer. Afterwards you should be able to scale your screen resolution to something larger than your computer’s physical restraints. However, be aware that these tweaks might not work on all netbooks (it was tested by users on the 1000H, 1005He or the 1005HA Asus devices) and might cause software instability when changing between options.

 

also I had to run the game fullscreen.good luck

Edited July 8, 2010 by aquamann