American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

Hopefully you will get some replay from HPS or JT since they know more about what would affect their games but here are my suggestions:

Check and make sure your DirectX is up to date. Latest version installed.

See what version of Nvidia drivers you have and then see if their is a newer release. The Microsoft update tends to lag the driver releases by a year so you can very easily be seeing a bug in these drivers that has been fixed. You may want to go to the Nvidia site and download one of the newest releases or even beta release and try it. Unfortunately, this is pretty much trial and error. Driver release are usually made to fix problems with newest game releases with very little attention to how games like HPS's are affected. Maybe some of the people using the latest GeForce cards can tell you what version they are using.

Once you are pretty confident that you have things up to date, uninstall one of the newer HPS games, be sure to go in and manually remove it's folders so nothing is left behind, then reinstall it. Before updating it to the newest release try it and see what happens.

Also you might play with some of the Settings. I know some cause problems with Win7. Alternative Scrolling shoud be checked in Settings for sure. If you have "Smooth Scroll" checked try unchecking it.

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)

Thanks for your suggestions, General. I have tried most of what you suggested though. My first thing I did was to make a complete uninstall and then install the game again and apply the latest patch. I have also updated my ATI graphic-drivers as I always do when they are released. I have also tried using older driver versions. And I have updated to the latest DirectX. It's interesting that both ATI and Nvidia users are experiencing this. For the time being I am using my laptop instead but it slows down my turn-around rate since I don't use it as often as I do with my stationary.

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Yours Respectfully
Major General Kling
5th Brigade
1st Division, Vth Corps
AotP, Union Army

You probably have tried all these as well but just in case I will mention. Run the dxdiag.exe and see if it shows any problems. Particularly if it shows the correct memory on your video card and DirectX versions. What makes it more confusing is you can have both 64 and 32 bit versions and I am not sure which actually is running on Win7 64bit. The HPS games are all 32bit I think. And, if that isn't bad enough the latest version of DirectX is 11 but games like HPS are still making calls to 9 so the correct versions of the DirectX 9 ddl's are also required. You have to run a utility like SIW to see some of these. My computer is running ATI Radeon Catalyst Ver. 11.5 which shows DirectX as 9.0 even though Win7 has 11 installed.

One other thing you might check is turning sound off on the game. There use to be a problem on some games with compatibility with sound card drivers and they would cripple the game.

I keep thinking that the problem you are seeing is something besides just video compatibility. HPS is an old game and most newer computers could run them without any video card support with no noticible slow down. In other words it isn't a hardware problem. The game is waiting on something to be completed that isn't working so it has to wait for a timeout and its probably doing it every paint cycle.

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)

Thank you! I will look into that. Sound is already off in my games, so no luck there unfortunatly.

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Yours Respectfully
Major General Kling
5th Brigade
1st Division, Vth Corps
AotP, Union Army

Well, in my case, the switch to an intergated video card made the difference. Yes it I also have more RAM, but I changed no settings on the computer or within the game, just more RAM and an integrated card, and voila, problem solved.

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General Michael Osborne

Sounds to me like it's something to do with the card then, seeing how it seems to work fine for everyone who has an integrated card, like on my laptop for an example where the games run fine. I even have less RAM on my laptop than on my stationary so that is most probobly not the issue.

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Yours Respectfully
Major General Kling
5th Brigade
1st Division, Vth Corps
AotP, Union Army

I agree Lucas. In my case the workaround involves temporarily adjusting downwards and then back upwards the hardware acceleration setting in the display properties in Win XP. The latest patches just don't seem to work well with some graphics cards. In the HPS Renaissance game the latest patch also makes some of the 3d icons invisible on top of the same slow response problem. I don't even play that game now, which is a shame. At least I can get the ACW games to play correctly with the irritating but effective workaround mentioned above.

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General Antony Barlow
2/1/XX, Army of the Cumberland

Thanks, Antony! Yeh my workaround right now is to use my laptop but I don't use it as often as my stationary, and I miss playing the games on a "regular" screen.

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Yours Respectfully
Major General Kling
5th Brigade
1st Division, Vth Corps
AotP, Union Army