Posted on 07/31/2006 6:24:18 PM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin
Technophiles...please help. Trying to get an ATI Fire GL1 Video Card, 32MB SDRAM, to work with the old Jane's WWII Air Combat game and/or Red Baron II (keeps my children interested in history). All I can get is 32 bit resolution which I believe is too much for the older video games. Several modes are available to select for the card, but I don't know which nor how to set them. Or, perhaps, that video card will NOT work with those games. Can anyone help?
Have you just tried to run the game as is?
Set the card to run at 32 bit color. This is not a demand in that a color MUST be 32 bit to be presented; however it simply means that the expected color will be 32 bit to/from the OS.
The game will utilize whatever color pallet it was designed with (16, 24 or 32 bit) and will simply pad the unused bits to the OS. The card doesn't know, or care. The application should handle this; and pass the video information off to the OS for modelling.
There should be no reason why your card won't work. Just make sure you have the latest drivers for the card, the latest patches for your games; and jump to microsoft.com and get the lastest DirectX stuff.
For reasons known only to Microsoft; they don't update DirectX in the windowsupdate area. It's stupid, it's insane and it's reality. DirectX 9.0c has been out for over 2 years; and the latest update came out just a month ago. Yes, after the latest update DirectX went from 9.0c to ...... yes; you guessed it .... 9.0c. No bump in the revision code, but new .dll and other assorted DirectX support stuff.
I've tried to run it in 32 bit mode, it says resolution mode not supported. I'm running Windows 2000 OS. Any suggestions?
Yes...in default mode...says "Resolution Mode Not Supported".
Sounds like the OS and drivers aren't happy.
Go here and get dl the latest and greatest for Win2K.
https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=293
Is "Resolution Mode not supported" coming up when you boot Windows, or when you try to launch the game?
One of the old video card bugs was that the game didn't know how to tell the OS to refresh the monitor at 60 Hz instead of 70, 72, 75, 85 or other refresh rates. A lot of people tell their monitor to refesh faster than 60 Hz to eliminate 'flicker'. The old games were 'stupid' in that they didn't attempt to set the video game at a combination of resolution (800x600) and refresh rate (60 Hz) which is most common. Sometimes your monitor may not support a particular refresh rate, at a resolution the game wants to play (1024x768, for example).
Set your monitor to refesh at 60 Hz; that may be all it takes.
Some of the later drivers provided 'brains' to the OS/Application in that they allowed the Application to easily change resolutions to legally supported resolutions by both the monitor and the video card. That's why I suggested downloading the latest drivers.
Listen to post #7.
32-bit refers to the color depth. Resolution is usually defined by the number of pixels, horizontal x vertical. Example: 600 x 400 or 1024 x 768, or 800 x 600.
Find out what resolutions are supported, and change the display resolution in the monitors/display control panel to one of the supported modes.
When I put the old ATI Rage 16MB card back in, then the games run, but they're jerky and don't flow smoothly. I've tried lowering the resolution in both cases to get the game to flow smoothly, but it still won't on that one computer (the Gateway). So, I guess I'll just have to try to find a faster CPU at a garage sae.
I've set those games up on network to encourage my boys to play and get into the history of WWI and WWII.
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