Drift... venting

roothorick

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This machine is gonna kill me, I swear.

  • NO SIGNAL IN... here we go. POSTs without videocard present, onboard works fine. Okay, videocard! Order new videocard.
  • Videocard arrives. Put it in computer. NO SIGNAL IN. This screen haunts my nightmares.
  • Try new videocard in a different computer. Get a picture. Try old videocard in said different computer. Get a picture. Sigh.
  • Swap in a compatible motherboard I happened to have. Not consistently POSTing, won't let me enter BIOS.
  • Hours of troubleshooting later, stumble across a post that says I need to update the BIOS to work with the processor the game was made for.
  • Apparently MSI's BIOS updater program does NOT like FreeDOS. More hours of head-banging ensue.
  • Swap in a different processor; now I can get into the BIOS. Discover "M-Flash" menu in BIOS. Leave head-shaped imprint in nearest sheetrock.
  • Begin BIOS update from USB via M-Flash menu. BIOS slows to a crawl and never starts flashing. Freaking out because I think I bricked my board, but it reboots fine.
  • Trial and error tells me the BIOS simply doesn't like this particular USB drive. A different drive and hey! Finally, BIOS version 270 on the board.
  • Reassemble computer, return to game, put in restore CD. Fails on disc 2. Closer inspection reveals a DEEP gash on the label side of the disc.
  • Tried cloning the disc with ImgBurn anyway. Fails miserably at 25%. Sigh.

I can't believe I'm spending another $10 on burned CD-Rs shipped from California. This time, I'm making backups, FIRST THING.

-E- Actually... I'm gonna try to make a franken-disc from what of the disc that is readable and some other older versions I have laying around. Wish me luck!

-E2- Here comes the worklog. Rolling updates as I figure things out.
  • Everything but PART2.IMG is readable on the disc. Promising.
  • The only differences between 1.25 Disc 2 and 1.23 Disc 2 is a newer nVIDIA display driver...except I can't confirm that PART2.IMG is the same since I can't read it off the 1.23 disc. It IS different from the 1.03 disc.
  • Didn't work. Isolinux bitched, checksum error. I'm trying just doing 1.23 disc 1 with 1.25 disc 2, only time will tell if it's stable or not and what game binary version I actually got.
  • Definitely NOT stable. Bluescreened during first boot, STOP 0x8E in nv4_disp.dll. Nice. Reimaging 1.23 disc 1 / 1.25 disc 2 again, and this time, I'm gonna use Parted Magic to swap in the drivers from the 1.23 disc 2.
 
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I got it working! Copying in the 1.23 driver did the magic, and the game claims it is 1.23. Seems to be linking okay, no signs of instability; we'll let it run for the weekend and see. What do you guys think, leave it with the hax 1.23/1.25, or reimage it with proper 1.23 when the disc arrives?

For those having similar issues, or want to try to "hack" the game to run on even newer videocards, the game runs in Windows XP Embedded, and uses normal PnP driver detection as part of first boot. You could probably get this game to run on literally anything that can boot XP and has sufficient RAM and VRAM by adding the appropriate drivers to C:\WINDOWS\inf, C:\WINDOWS\system32, and C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers. I say this because Disc 2 detects what motherboard chipset and videocard is present and simply copies the appropriate driver to those three locations. From what I can tell, INF files go in \inf, DLL files go in \system32, and SYS files go in \system32\drivers.
 
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