Game Crash

[shyone274]

I've been unable to play hinterland, it crashes everytime as soon as it is done 'creating world' without any error messages or explanations. It looks like someone else on this forum had this same problem, but I have a different video card.
Any help would be appreciated

[Keith]

You've got two hardware "strikes" working against you.

The game requires a minimum of 512MB of memory. You have 510MB available with 2MB of your total 512MB being used by the computer for video memory. So you fall short in that requirement by a little bit.

You have a Intel 82865G video chipset and not a video card. These chipsets are good for average games and applications that don't require a lot of video rendering used in such games like Hinterland.

For the most part these video chipsets usually don't have the proper video drivers that support 3D graphic features like Pixel Shaders and Transformation & Lighting (T&L). Some Intel chipsets are reported to support those features in the hardware, but the drivers supplied by the computer maker usually doesn't enable those features. Intel started writing drivers for their some of the late model chipsets a couple of years ago. You would have to go to the Intel.com support website and see if they have such a driver for your 82865G chipset that supports Pixel Shaders and T&L.

The only other way around that is to buy a third party video card that supports 3D graphic features required by the game. According to the Dell technical support documents on the Dimension 4600C (http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/SYSTEMS/dim4600C/sm/index.htm), there is a AGP 4x/8x video card slot (http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/SYSTEMS/dim4600C/sm/sffagp.htm) on your motherboard that can be use for such a video card.

A video card that is DirectX 9 compliant from either nVidia aor ATI would do nicely. The problem is that AGP type video cards are getting hard to find because they have been superceded by the newer PCI-express type slots. I had to replace my nVidia 7600GS AGP 8X card a couple of months ago and it was hard finding a replacement, but I did find one.

There is a a program out there calld 3DAnalyze that will let you emulate features like Pixel Shaders and T&L, but it doesn't work in all cases and since it is a emulator the performance might be slow. I've mentioned this program in some old posts on this board. If you do a board search for 3DAnalyze you'll be able to find them.