Star Trek Elite Force crash problem

[nightshade89]

So I've been trying to get a bunch of my old games running on an old comp that I was given. After spending many days trying to get most of them to run I've been mostly successful. The exception has been ST Elite Force. I don't know why, but about 1 minute into the game, it has a fatal error and crashes. This is usually happens around the 3rd time I shoot my phaser rifle if that means anything. Right now the computer is using a 8Mb Rage XL video card, around 480-500Mb RAM, a Pentium III 667 MHz processor, Windows 98SE. I can't figgure out why It's doing it, since as far as I can figgure out, other than Windows 98SE, the system seems fairly comperable to the computer I used to play it all the time (A Presario, 5000 series I think, the one with the coloured front panels that could be changed) Hope someone can help with this. Thanks!

[skywalker06]

I would update directx to the latest version, I think its 8 for 98, make sure you got the latest drivers for your graphics and sound card if possible and any patches for your game. Also it could be worthwhile running disk cleanup, scandisk and defrag.

[nightshade89]

I just finished reformatting and had to get the drivers off the net, so I believe they are the newest, have dx8.1a and had the expansion pack with the patch in it installed too

[skywalker06]

Does the problem still exist?

[nightshade89]

That was the problem I was having after all those things, I've also reformatted 2 r 3 times because I've been trying to get different stuff to work with the computer that doesn't always agree with windows and its done it between formats

[mrpijey]

Have you updated it with all the patches? The game even starts on a modern Win7 system so it should work on an older one. However the RageXL is a notoriously bad videocard for gaming so it could be that it needs patches to work on that card. You should try to get something better for that system, like a TNT2 or Voodoo2 system. Or better as long as it's not the old ATI Rage-series, Intel, SIS or VIA graphics.

[98fan]

I checked the Star Trek Elite Force box and Rage is not listed as one of the supported graphics chipsets.

That said, your crashing problem sounds very much like a problem I had with a totally different game many years ago. In Discworld Noir the game would crash every single time when I clicked at the same point in the game on my Windows 98 FE system. The problem went away when I upgraded the MS Intellimouse driver from version 2.2 to 3.0.

[nightshade89]

Any thoughts on where I might pick up one of those video cards? As far as I know, it has to be an AGP card, but beyond that my computing expertise comes down to whatever recommendation I'm given and putting things in the slot it says on the directions, It took me like 10 years just to figgure out how to make a cd-rom work in Dos mode on windows. I've looked around on e-bay but I'm not really sure what I'm looking for and also alot of stuff looks like its from China, Korea, or the USSR (I know its not the USSR anymore, but thats the countries its from), and I'm kinda worried about buying something from there.

[98fan]

Star Trek Voyager Elite Force will run on XP and Windows 2000, it will even run on NT4.0 SP5. You don't have to upgrade your old computer just for this game if you have an XP box.

I bought a CPU from China on one occasion and all was good. They sent me a faster model than the one I paid for. Look at the sellers feedback if you have doubts.

Judging from the prices of individual components, sometimes it is more economical to get an entire computer second hand. If you want to run 98SE then the last Intel chipset that officially supported it was i865 which supports up to a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 and 2GB of DDR RAM. Computers with this chipset were manufactured around 2005. Many models offered drivers for 98SE but not all of them so check the manufacturer's website. They far exceed the hardware requirements for Windows 98 era games and typically including 64MB of onboard graphics memory. Computers of this age can be had for next to nothing.

[nightshade89]

well, I got me an nvidia geforce2 mx400 i'm gunna try out, I'm upgrading from 8MB to 64 MB lol