Oldcastle on 14/12/2009 at 18:14

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Hey all. I recently put together a system out of *very* old parts and installed a copy of Win98SE on it. The purpose? Solely to play old games that either don't need anything newer or actually run better on old hardware/OS. Jedi Knight, Half-Life, Deus Ex, NOLF, Grim Fandango, ...

And Thief 2 & System Shock 2. Hence this post ...

I cannot get the graphics working for Thief 2. When I go into Video Options, my choices only go up to 800x600 and all at 8 bit graphics. If I start the game it appears to be running in software mode, or at least 8bit, then crashes after a couple seconds. I also cannot choose anything other than "Primary Display Adapter" in Video Options.

For the record, I am having the exact same problem in System Shock 2. But not in any other game, so far at least.

I have tried:
editing cam.cfg to set resolution manually;
uncommenting the safe_texture_manager line in user.cfg;
uninstalling/reinstalling the game;
installing multiple versions of my graphics drivers;
dropping a D3D dll directly into the /Thief2 directory.

My sense is that the game simply can't find the Direct3D drivers - why is this? Anyone know what's going on? I know that many people have had problems like this, but I thought it was always because of running the game on newer hardware and under WinXP. I'm trying to use hardware that was current at the time of release, and the OS it was designed for. That's what's really got me stumped. I thought that going through the headaches of installing/tweaking Win 98 was really going to pay off when the OS was friendlier to old games, but this just another headache.

System specs:

Asus A7V-E
AMD Duron 800 MHz
256 MB RAM
64 MB 3DFx Voodoo 5 5500 AGP - using custom drivers [for the record, I had the same problem with other drivers, and with a much newer nVidia card as well]
Hercules GameTheatre XP sound card

Again, other Direct3D games seem to be fine.

Any ideas?

Oldcastle on 28/12/2009 at 15:45

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Oops, sorry, forgot about this thread.

I tried what Mudi suggested. Update via MS found about 8 MB worth of files to add to my DirectX installation. But the problem persists.

I have really tried just about everything I can think of. This is such a drag as I'd intended to use this antique Win98 box to introduce my son to some of the games that have meant the most to me, starting with Thief II.

If anyone has any other ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks

Albert on 29/12/2009 at 07:18

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So, did this work, or what? I mean, I don't want to go wasting $20 bucks on Ebay just to find that my Frankenstein-rig isn't worth the effort.

Not that I'm impatient or anything, it's just, this discussion has needed feedback for quite a while now.