Unable to launch Darwinia

[cosmos284]

I downloaded Darwinia from Steam, and I am unable to launch the game. I've tried launching it from Steam, and from the desktop icon, neither works. Some times I get a few bars of music, but not always. When I attempt to launch the game I get a black screen, sometimes the task bar is on the bottom, but larger than normal. I get a Windows error message that says "darwinia.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. " There is also the option to send a Wincows error report.

I'm not a gamer, and I purchased Darwinia on a whim, it sounded fun! I suspect my computer isn't powerful enough to handle the game, but I'll defer to the experts. I have restarted the computer several times since the problem first surfaced.

I updated the driver for my graphics card, updated DirecttX, updated the sound card driver, downloaded the patch and updated Windows. There is no blackbox.txt file.

Operating system: Windows XP Pro SP2
Processor: AMD Athalon XP 2500+ 1.8 GHZ
Memory: 512 MB
DirectX version: 9.0C
Display: Chip type Radeon 7000 Series AGP
Approx. total memory: 32.0 MB
Drivers: main driver ati2dvag.dll
version: 6.14.0010.6587
date: 1/4/06
audio: Realtek AC97 Audio
Driver: 5.10.0000.6010
date: 1/13/06

Thanks for your assistance.

[ev0|]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is your issue, but you have a decently powerful CPU and an AGP slot, but you're using a very marginal card (a radeon 7000 is pretty slow and low end)

I would suggest looking on ebay or going to www.pricewatch.com and looking for either an ATI Radeon 9600 or a Nvidia Geforce 6600.

In fact, i'll make it easy for you. Go to pricewatch and paste in

POWERCOLOR ATI RADEON 9600PRO 128MB

in the search box and that's the card you should get, it's brand new and only 60 bucks. These cards are MUCH more modern and they shouldn't be very expensive anymore. You'd really improve the performance of your entire system, be able to play darwinia (it's an awesome, awesome game, you should really do it just for this game) and you'll be ready for windows Vista's hardware accelerated user interface sometime later this year as well. All you need is a 9600 or a 6600, nothing more, and you'll be set for life, if you aren't a big gamer. Make sure you look for AGP interface cards if you decide to look around, and look only for 9600Pro or 6600 with no letters after it because the letters are higher end cards which are overkill for you. You'll be able to play most all modern 3D games. You'll notice a significant windows performance improvement as well, and even more so when you upgrade to windows Vista when it is released. Good Luck.

[shinygerbil]

Basically, this is a known problem with the 7000 series of graphics cards. (And some of the integrated laptop graphics cards, which are based on the 7000s.)

Here is one of the several topics covering this issue, and its lack of fixes (note how old the problem is). I believe you'll find links to other threads about this problem there, and a search will probably reveal more.

http://forums.introversion.co.uk/darwin ... php?t=2267

To summarise:

The 7000 series is flawed. This is ATi's problem.

Darwinia doesn't like displaying the World Map due to the above problem.

As anyone who has heard of this problem will tell you, I moan and whinge a lot about the fact that Introversion have yet to even acknowledge the problem, as far as I can recall, despite its existence since the game was released.

[broadcloak]

I get exactly the same problem, and I'm trying to run it on an ATI Radeon 7000 card too, with a pretty decent system, but what I can't understand is, the demo worked fine for me, so why won't the full game?

[NeoThermic]

I get exactly the same problem, and I'm trying to run it on an ATI Radeon 7000 card too, with a pretty decent system, but what I can't understand is, the demo worked fine for me, so why won't the full game?

The demo doesn't use certian OpenGL calls that the full game makes (mainly to display the world map). Thus the demo will work fine, but the full game won't.

However, you can help. What I would like you to do is download and run this program. All it does is dump the information from your card into a file named 'ExtensionsSupport.txt'. After you've run that, please post the text from the file here inside [code] tags.

NeoThermic

[broadcloak]

Here you go. How does this help though?

Code: Select all

Failed to get address of glBindBufferARB function
Failed to find GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object support


Supported Extensions:
GL_ARB_multitexture GL_EXT_texture_env_add GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array GL_S3_s3tc GL_ARB_occlusion_query GL_ARB_texture_border_clamp GL_ARB_texture_compression GL_ARB_texture_cube_map GL_ARB_texture_env_add GL_ARB_texture_env_combine GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3 GL_ARB_texture_mirrored_repeat GL_ARB_transpose_matrix GL_ARB_vertex_blend GL_ARB_window_pos GL_ATI_envmap_bumpmap GL_ATI_texture_env_combine3 GL_ATI_texture_mirror_once GL_ATI_vertex_streams GL_ATIX_texture_env_combine3 GL_ATIX_texture_env_route GL_EXT_abgr GL_EXT_bgra GL_EXT_clip_volume_hint GL_EXT_draw_range_elements GL_EXT_fog_coord GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays GL_EXT_packed_pixels GL_EXT_point_parameters GL_EXT_rescale_normal GL_EXT_secondary_color GL_EXT_separate_specular_color GL_EXT_stencil_wrap GL_EXT_texgen_reflection GL_EXT_texture3D GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc GL_EXT_texture_cube_map GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp GL_EXT_texture_env_combine GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3 GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias GL_EXT_texture_mirror_clamp GL_EXT_texture_object GL_EXT_texture_rectangle GL_EXT_vertex_array GL_HP_occlusion_test GL_NV_blend_square GL_NV_occlusion_query GL_NV_texgen_reflection GL_SGI_color_matrix GL_SGIS_generate_mipmap GL_SGIS_multitexture GL_SGIS_texture_border_clamp GL_SGIS_texture_edge_clamp GL_SGIS_texture_lod GL_SUN_multi_draw_arrays GL_WIN_swap_hint WGL_EXT_extensions_string WGL_EXT_swap_control
Renderer:
RADEON 7000 SDR x86/MMX/3DNow!/SSE
Version:
1.3.1050 WinXP Release
Vender:
ATI Technologies Inc.