game does not start at all (old Athlon CPU?) [SOLVED] | Forums

[rlmergeuser]

Hi,

I just downloaded Trials2 "Trials2_SE_1.07_installer.exe" and istalled it. But the game doesn't start at all.

The launcher appears, but no matter which resolution I choose, no matter wheather window or fullscreen, no matter if audio or not - after pressing "Start" nothing happens. The launcher ends and I'm back on windows.

There is no "...trials..." process in the task manager.

Graphic card: Radeon 9600XT Edition
RAM: 512 MB
Processor: 1,24GHz AMD Athlon

I can't find a log file or something else which could help me... who can?

Thanks,
superfly (from germany)

[rlmergeuser]

now I increased frontside bus freq to 133MHz and CPU ist now running with 1,67GHz - still the game is not starting.

Windows XP Professional SP2


superfly

[sebastianaalton]

The CPU frequency should not matter at all. We have tested the new v1.08 with a 630 MHz Celeron, and it runs the game fine.

A quick list of things to check:

1. When you install any new program or game to your computer, you must have Windows administrator privileges. If you are using a user account with reduced privileges, the game installed most likely cannot install the required DirectX and OpenAL driver packages and will not run properly. All computers have a administrator account (selectable at the startup screen). If no startup (select account) screen is shown when you start Windows, you have only one account and it has automatically administrator privileges.

2. When have you upgraded your graphics card drivers last time? If this is more than half a year ago, please download the newest drivers from http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html and reboot your computer.

3. If these tips do not help, you can find the game default install directory at "C:\Program Files\Trials 2 Second Edition". There should be the following executable files:
launcher.exe
trials2.exe - double click on this to start the game on high graphics mode
trials2_low.exe - double click on this to start the game on low graphics mode

[rlmergeuser]

Hi sebbi,

thanks for your quick reply.

1) I have administrator privileges.

2) I updated the graphic drivers already to the latest ones today. Now I have driver version 8.512.0.0 from 2008-07-03

3) I already found the executables. But
-- launcher starts, but when I press "Start" launcher ends but nothing else happens. I tried all combinations of resolutions, window or fullscreen, audio.
-- trials2.exe - short hourglass but nothing else
-- trials2_low.exe - also nothing but a hourglass for less than 1 sec.

I'm at a loss now - hope you're not

[rlmergeuser]

no answer yet - what a bummer!

sebbi, could you send me a "debug" version which creates a detailed log file? so that we can find out what is going wrong on my machine?

otherwise I would like to have my money back.

regards
superfly

[sebastianaalton]

The most likely cause of your problem is your CPU model. The oldest AMD supported CPU is the Athlon XP. Athlon XP is the first AMD CPU with SSE instruction support, and the game requires SSE instruction support to work. The old "Athlon" didn't support SSE, and that's why it's not included in our minimum required CPU list. All the newer AMD CPUs (Athlon XP, Athlon 64 and Athlon X2) are supported. For the same reason the game does not work on Intel Pentium 2 CPUs, and needs Intel Pentium 3 at least to work (it's the first Intel CPU with SSE support). The speed of the CPU (MHz) does not matter at all. Sadly many other new games also require SSE instructions to work, and do not start on your computer.

Please contact support here (http://www.redlynxtrials.com/SupportContact.action), and give your purchase information (Paypal transaction ID).

[rlmergeuser]

Hi,

my DxDiag says:

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.7GHz

O.k., SSE instruction support is not mentioned, but Athlon XP.

With a programm called "AIDA32" I can see


CPUID Properties
CPUID Manufacturer AuthenticAMD
CPUID CPU Name AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+
CPUID Revision 0681h
Extended CPUID Revision 0781h
Platform ID CBh (Socket A)
IA CPU Serial Number Unknown

Instruction Set
...
IA SSE Supported
IA SSE 2 Not Supported
IA SSE 3 Not Supported
...


...so something with SSE seems to be in my CPU. As I don't know what SSE is, I don't know the difference betewen SSE, SSE 2 and SSE 3... if that's important or not.

So again my quesiton: are you able to produce a debug version that creates a log file, or another question: why is no error message displayed saying "your CPU is too old, it doesn't support SSE". Once upon a time I worked as an ORACLE developer, and there something like this is called "Exception handling"...

regards
superfly

[sebastianaalton]

Seems that the CPU you have is a Athlon XP after all, and has SSE instruction set. So that is not the problem.

CPUs without SSE instruction set are so rare nowadays that the exeption handling for those CPU types were not implemented (we didn't even have one at work to test). DX9 did not exist at the time the old Athlon CPUs were sold, so we didn't think it was likely that someone would put a new DX9 graphics chip to a old motherboard + CPU combo.

Could you check the following ones:
1. You installed the game using a Windows account with administrator privileges.
2. You have enough hard drive space for the game (around 300 megabytes should be enough for the install + setup files + downloaded content)
3. The game installed properly. All your exe files are of proper size (not zero for example). You can try to download it again and install it again to be sure.
4. Your user account name does not have special characters not found in latin-1 codepage. This bug has been fixed in the new v1.08 version (coming out soon).
5. Your firewall program has been configured to allow Trials 2 to get into the net. The first thing the game should try to do is to check updates from the net.

Debug executable does not help in this situation, as the game doesn't seem to be crashing at all (no Windows error dialog). If the game would crash normally, you would be able to save the crash dump and send it to us by e-mail and we could investigate. Do you get normal Windows error dialogs when other programs crash? It's possible to disable the Windows error messages (and the automatic crash dump save).

[rlmergeuser]

now I've updated my BIOS - and everything works.

Thanks sebbi for your support and the time you spent on my problem.

You can set this thread now to SOLVED.

Best regards from germany
superfly

[sebastianaalton]

Nice to hear that the problem got fixed.

If I remember correctly, some old Athlon motherboards detected Athlon XP incorrectly as the original Athlon. There was a bios patch released for this (I also downloaded it years ago). This could be the cause of your problem.