Armada I refuses to not be a bitch

posted on February 4th, 2011, 11:55 am

I've been hankering to play some Armada I for old times' sake, but I've hit a wall in my otherwise legendary doggedness to make old games work. I would appreciate the ever lovin hell out of any assistance anyone could offer.


My system:

Windows 7 64-bit
4 gigs ram
Nvidia 8600M GT

(I used to have an identical laptop, but with win vista 32, 2 gigs of ram, and an 8400M GS. Armada worked perfectly on that)

Armada installs and starts up fine. About half a second into any map, the game crashes to the desktop with no warning.

Very occasionally if the graphics are turned on 16-bit colors and sickeningly low res (safe-mode), it'll work, but that's not really a solution.

All logical compatibility modes have been tried along with administrator rights.

I even tried VirtualBox with Windows XP 32-bit, only 2 gigs of ram, and the 3d graphics card wrapper that allows the Win 7 drivers to translate to XP. Same exact symptoms.

Frankly, I'm stumped. Nvidia issue? The 8400 worked fine though. Some say that it needs to only have 2 or less gigs of ram available, but usually that would mean that it wouldn't start at all. Both Win 7 and XP crash in the same way, so I'm thinking either hardware incompatibility or driver issue.

I'd like to know if anyone else is having a similar issue and what their systems are like. I'm not super optimistic, but maybe I've just overlooked something or there's a patch or something I never heard about.

Anyway, thanks for reading this monster of a post.

posted on February 4th, 2011, 12:30 pm

I've also got this issue (although only in Windows 7 for some reason, works fine in Vista with the same machine...) and I think it's been narrowed down to being a nVidia issue (I have an 8500GT).

A friend of mine has recently set up a forum to try and revitalise the Armada 1 community, it's located here: Star Trek Armada 2011 • Index page

There's some possible solutions posted there, otherwise afaik they're still working on trying to find a solution...

posted on February 4th, 2011, 12:48 pm

I know I have had some issues w/Nvidia driver issues before.. I know Nvidia did just release some new drivers w/in the last 2-3 weeks.  I know its a lame advice, but try those drivers?? 

"Version:
266.58 WHQL
Release Date:
2011.01.18"

posted on February 4th, 2011, 2:01 pm

A1 isnt supposed to support 8 series nvidia cards so im surprised your 8400 worked but laptop cards get different patchs like laptop writer drives compared to their pc counter parts.

posted on February 4th, 2011, 2:22 pm

armada 1 running on new machines tends to be a bit of a lottery i have observed.

the last thing i can suggest trying is installing win98 in a virtual machine, with your powerful computer and some (a lot of) luck it will run without performance issues.

posted on February 4th, 2011, 2:44 pm

A friend of mine has recently set up a forum to try and revitalise the Armada 1 community, it's located here: Star Trek Armada 2011 • Index page

This looks really promising! He just needs more time and some reliable testers.

Thanks to everyone who's posted. I'm almost positive it's either a card/driver issue, an OS issue, or some combination. I'll try some older drivers I guess. Win98 in VirtualBox is the perfect storm of one thing at a time ruining the whole venture. XP works fine, but the driver from my Win7 is being wrapped by the emulator, so the same problem's happening. This makes me think the key is the driver or the card.

Here's hoping it's the driver. If I can find an older Nvidia driver that works from back before they patched the fun out of their cards, I'll be sure to let you guys know. Having to rollback drivers constantly kinda sucks, but it would be better than nothing.

[x73rmin8r]

posted on February 4th, 2011, 5:58 pm

Last edited by x73rmin8r on February 4th, 2011, 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Slight update:

I was a moron and didn't patch Armada from 1.1 to 1.2. With 1.2 now it kinda runs, but the mouse lags like crazy and the first mission of the campaign crashes after some graphics glitching. Instant action intermittently works, but the with the mouse problem. I'm going to try the recent Nvidia drivers, but if anything I'd assume they'll just make it worse. Might try some old drivers if this doesn't work.


EDIT:
F&*%kballs:

New driver made it much much worse. Visual tearing and strobing now along with the slow mouse.

posted on February 4th, 2011, 6:50 pm

Yeah, just keep trying the older drivers til it works.

posted on February 4th, 2011, 6:58 pm

Slight update:

I was a moron and didn't patch Armada from 1.1 to 1.2. With 1.2 now it kinda runs, but the mouse lags like crazy and the first mission of the campaign crashes after some graphics glitching. Instant action intermittently works, but the with the mouse problem. I'm going to try the recent Nvidia drivers, but if anything I'd assume they'll just make it worse. Might try some old drivers if this doesn't work.

For the mouse.
Is there an Option like directinput or something like that? I had such a problem with Conquest: Frontier Wars. The Mouse was extreme slow and laged a bit. But all this gone away after turning of the directinput.

posted on February 5th, 2011, 2:42 pm

Slight update:

I was a moron and didn't patch Armada from 1.1 to 1.2. With 1.2 now it kinda runs, but the mouse lags like crazy and the first mission of the campaign crashes after some graphics glitching. Instant action intermittently works, but the with the mouse problem. I'm going to try the recent Nvidia drivers, but if anything I'd assume they'll just make it worse. Might try some old drivers if this doesn't work.


EDIT:
F&*%kballs:

New driver made it much much worse. Visual tearing and strobing now along with the slow mouse.

Thats expected with 8 series cards updating drivers is pointless unless nvidia cared about such an old game and fixed the issues with there stuff.

posted on February 7th, 2011, 3:15 pm

Also I have the same problem with Armada 1.

The install on my Vista 64bit Lap Top System ran just fine even without any compatibility mode enabled.

The game itself also runs fine however only with XP compatibility enabled. Without any compatibility it gives me a ram error.

On Win 98 compatibility I'll get the mouse lags which aren't any good for gameplay.
The sound in XP compatibility mode is working great and it isn't crashing at all what is surprisingly the case on my Vista32 bit computer.

The only remaining problem are massive fps drops whenever a ship explodes or is playing any other animation. (what is also the case for Fleet ops ^^ but of course not 10 times so bad like in Armada1.)

Do you know of any fan made patch or any dev command which makes Armada1 running in Direct X 8 mode. Because I think that's the main issue with the game. It can't handle Dx9 & Dx10.

Why can't the fleetops team create an inofficial patch for it to make it compatible with modern systems. Should be easy for them.

posted on February 7th, 2011, 4:28 pm

i think u overestimate our dev team, they work miracles, but what u ask probably is far from easy.

They work on modding armada2 not 1, different games. fleetops was originally gonna be for a1, but that was years ago.

i dont think it is easy for anyone to do.

Even if the dev team could do it, it would almost certainly take them away from what they wanna be doing (making fleetops) for some time. and its not their job to fix a1, it was the original maker's job to get it right first time, and they failed. U cant blame the fleetops devs for not making an a1 patch.

Also welcome to the forums and hope u enjoy your time here.

posted on February 7th, 2011, 5:18 pm

Hehe I'm not blaming your dev team in any way. It was more of an idea and recommendation. What would I give to replay the A1 SP campaign one more time lagfree and fully working.

People like your dev team could surely do a difference out here. But I agree they are of course distracted by Fleet ops what is a good thing.

Honestly I don't think A1 & A2 are that much different. A2 uses more of an enhanced game engine but nothing more nothing less. I could be wrong of course. The Campaign & model , map structure are at least nearly identical.

Anyway enough of that. If someone finds a solution to get rid of the lags then tell me.

And thanks for the welcome greetings I'm actually registered since 2007 and had plenty of posts earlier but it seems that all topics are deleted since then. So I'm back at 0. ^^ Well I wasn't online here for a very long time.

Greetings 23-down

posted on February 7th, 2011, 6:24 pm

Hehe, if you wait a few months, the A1 campaign will be a mod to Fleet Ops (hopefully) using Megadroid's Mission Mod

posted on February 7th, 2011, 6:58 pm

Hehe, if you wait a few months, the A1 campaign will be a mod to Fleet Ops (hopefully) using Megadroid's Mission Mod

Yep, definitely. Finishing off some parts at the minute but should release v1 soon at which point I'll have more time for the A1 campaign port.