How’s this for insult to sodomy…yet more reasons I hate Bethesda for stuff that’s really not their fault.
When I aquired Arena in 1995, my Packard Bell 486 had 4 meg of RAM. Plenty for everything I needed the machine for. Well, except for playing Arena. So I nip off down to the local computer shop and drop $80 on a 4 meg RAM chip. Now I’m smokin’ with 8 meg of RAM! Game loads and my protracted battle of the Bethesda Bugs begins.
3 months later, Microsoft released the RAM-hungry Win 95 and RAM prices plummeted. My $80 upgrade would now have cost like $10.
11 years later, I’m running on 512 RAM and just under 1 gig processor speed. Not exactly Univac, but better than a 486. Gotta run Arena in Dosbox now because Windows pretends not to remember who it was in the 3.1 days. Guess what. I cant run the fucking game NOW either because, get this, MY. PROCESSOR. IS. TOO. SLOW! Dosbox is gobbling up all my resources to try and pretend my monitor is a VGA or somesuch, and there’s nothing left to push the (primitive) graphics of Arena! I done did all the [ctrl]+F8 & [ctrl]+F12 I can do, and it’s still running like molasses.
Feck. Guess I’ll just have to go out and get me a new machine with a REAL processor. And you know what? I ain’t gonna run no stinking Arena on it. Nopers. I’m gonna pull out my 13 month old virgin Platinum Neverwinter Nights and play IT to death! Virgin? Well, barely. See, I discovered about an hour after I bought it that it really wants a lot more than a pukey 1 gig processor.
Know what? Screw this. I’m gonna go play Solitaire. With CARDS.
Agreed. I’m not sure why anyone would think that an HDTV would look better than a good PC display and a high end graphics card. 720p or 1080i on my TV don’t look anything like 1600 x1200 on my monitor. On those occasions when I turn it up, my PC soundcard and speakers are at least as good as the 5.1 system on my TV.
Taking into consideration Duffer’s thoughts regarding the drive, I’ve been scouring the forums and it seems it was a writing flaw in one of the DVD batches that caused them to run on some DVD ROMs but not on others. Whether this correlates with Sturmhauke’s over-my-head explanation, I wouldn’t know; not really technically inclined.
So, in the end, when my tissues had run out and I’d outplayed my Trial version of Mount & Blade (a fantastically genial shareware game, by the way, check it out) I crumbled and bought a new DVD burner. So, it works now! Hoorah! Now I’ve only got to stack up the whining and whinging regarding my shitty FPS with my P-IV 3,06 GHZ / 1024MB 533BUS RAM / ATI Radeon 9800 Pro / AC97 rig. But, ah, I’ll be buying a new computer sometime this year, so I’ll probably pick it back up then.
Thanks for the sympathy and patience, so rare and uncommon here in the Pit.
Maybe, maybe not. Some copy protection schemes might be called “intentionally flawed”. If there really was a manufacturing error, that’s just something that happens sometimes. On the other hand, it may be that the “writing flaw” was known beforehand, and Bethesda is just trying to cover its ass.
Huh. Freaky. I have a Athlon 3400+, 1 GB of RAM ( Corsair’s “value select” ) and an X800xl ( AGP ) and it auto-detected “high” settings for me. I just loaded it today and barely started the tutorial before I had to head to work, so I can’t speak much to real world performance yet. But so far it looks great and moves smoothly. I guess the video card makes all the difference.
Got my new video card yesterday, and oh my God, this is a pretty, pretty game. Also, doesn’t crash as much as it used to. Of course, simultaneous with the arrival of the new card was news that we’re doing OT for most, if not all, of this weekend. :smack: By the time I get some time off to play with my new graphics card, it’s going to be obsolete again.