My brother picked up a copy of Airport Tycoon 2 at the used bookstore. It won’t play on his new Dell Dimension. He tells me that it was new and unopened when he got it.
He’d also played the free trial demo on the machine before purchasing and it worked - but now he thinks it wasn’t AT2, maybe it was AT the original.
I had him download the AT2 free trial, and that doesn’t work either.
When he goes to play, he gets the startup screen (the one that asks you what you want to do, and you click “play now” or something) and then the screen goes black and then back to the desktop.
According to the GameSpy, the requirements are:
Pentium III 600 MHz
64 MB RAM
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
DirectX 8.1
8 MB DirectX-compatible 3D accelerator
DirectX-compatible sound card
4x CD-ROM drive
500 MB hard-disk space
Here’s the system specs:
XP Home
512MB ram
Intel® Celeron® D Processor 330 (2.66GHz, 533MHz FSB, 256KB L2 cache)
Graphics Controller: http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intel865g/
“Integrated 2.1 Channel Audio” (unfortunately forgot to get the exact specs last time i was there)
DirectX 9.0c (passes all tests)
Plenty of HD space
There’s nothing in the event log about why the game is failing.
I know a good bit about computers but I will admit that since I give a rat’s ass about games, I don’t pay close attention to making games work on machines. But, since this new machine is in my “stable” of computers I service, I turn to you guys for help.
The only “snag” i can think of between the specs and the system is the “Direct X compatible sound card”…but we got this machine about a month ago. Seems like a default sort of configuration fo rany modern sound controller. Any ideas?
In Explorer (or through My Computer) locate the executable of the game program file. Right-click it and go to ‘Properties’. Click the ‘Compatibility’ tab. Under the ‘Compatibility mode’ section check the box that says “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” Click the drop down box beneath that and select Windows 98. Click ‘Apply’ and ‘OK’.
Try updating his video card drivers to the latest and greatest.
Same goes for audio drivers.
Go into Compatibility Mode. Try all the OS options. Try all the display settings options in there too.
Hope that worked. If not,
I’m getting pretty desparate now. Run MSCONFIG, select SELECTIVE STARTUP then uncheck Load System Services and Load Startup Items.
Good luck.
My wife tried my old copy of Aiport Tycoon 1 just last week. It ran just fine on her newish XP Home machine, but she couldn’t figure out how to lay an airport out properly… something with either how to lay out landing strips or control towers.
Forgot about compatibility mode. I actually told him to try that but he can get confused if I go too fast. I’ll have to check it out later when I go over there.
Also forgot to mention I did check the drivers for the vid card and they were the latest. Actually the latest DELL would let me use shakes fist but rather current.
Will check sound drivers tonight and try the other suggestions.
I’ve noted a lot of the “Tycoon” games (notably Zoo Tycoon) don’t work at all with those Intel Extreme Integrated Graphic Whatsits.
I seem to recall that there’s a setting one can modify in the raw config files that can fix this, I’ll ask my father-in-law and see if he can remember how he fixed his.
I had that problem with a number of games on a Compaq I had. When I did a clean install of the OS (not using the restore disks that came with the thing, but a M$ produced copy of Windows) I was suddenly able to play all kinds of games that I couldn’t get to work before, so it’s not limited to Dell.
Unfortunately, some of the crapware can be so deeply embedded that unless you’re a programmer and know what you’re looking for, you’ll never be able to find it.
