I had a nice long post typed out but the board ate it :mad: so I’ll type it again and hope I don’t miss anything.
My friend is trying to get the sims 2 body shop to work on her computer, she only had an onboard video card so she went and bought a GeForce fx 5200 to run it. With that card she has an Athlon 1700, 512mb of ram and is running winXP home. I’m not sure what motherboard, but under device manager/system it says sis730 (ie. sis730 Host CPU bridge, SiS PCI to ISA bridge etc.)
Anyway, when she trys to run it, the screen is all tinted red and flickering and the graphics are distorted. when she forces software rendering it works but the sims are missing. The card works for windows just fine and the only other game she plays is sims 1 which also works. she says her friend has the same card and can run the program just fine.
She has tried everything here and all I could come up with googling is this which seems to be the same problem (red color, font changed, not very clear) but dosen’t seem to have had a solution. She has also downloaded new drivers for pretty much everything (besides the motherboard).
I’m pretty much all out of ideas, so if anyone has had this problem before or has something else to try that might help I could use the help!
This is probably not the cause, but has she tried altering the monitor’s settings?
Loading a game will cause the graphics card to switch to another mode, and it’s quite possible it’s a mode the monitor has never been ‘calibrated’ (width, height, position etc…) for. Try different screen relolutions in the game. And try messing with the monitors settings/
In some cases you need to defeat the onboard video with a jumper setting, not just the BIOS setting, or artifacts like this can happen. Also make sure the BIOS video settings are appropriate to the new card and are not still set the the onboard video chipset parameters. You may also need to force an IRQ assignment for the new card via the BIOS.
Does she have any player-made skins, heads, or objects? Sometimes one of the objects gets corrupted and it can do horrible things to your game until it’s removed.
Lobsang: I never thought about that, and while I doubt it is the problem I’ll have her try and mess with it and even see if there are new drivers for the monitor that might help.
astro: I was thinking maybe it was something like this, but I don’t know what motherboard she has and she does not have the instructions for it. Is there a way to tell so I can download the instructions? I’d hate to try and talk her through it with her haveing to write everything in the BIOS menus down and messenging me with it. Also, no way I’m gonna have her fiddle with jumpers without instructions
Jaade: nah, she only has the default instillation (and has tried downloading that 3 times in case it was corrupted). it never worked to begin with.
You’re really going to need the mobo manual to fool around with the jumpers. Sometimes larger manufs paste a MB layout diagram on the inside face of the case cover, but this is fairly rare these days. The good news is that lots of the bigger MB manufs put their manuals on online.
