Games will not start!

Talonrazor

So I installed Fable after borrowing it from a friend and it will not start at all. When I click the .exe or run it from autoplay, nothing happens. Same thing that GTA:SA has been doing to me after I re-installed it. What could be causing this? All my drivers, DirectX are all up-to-date.

I get no splash screen or nothing. Harddrive spins for a second then nothing.

Very frustrating.

Solve my problem, you beautiful bastards!

Talonrazor

No one has any ideas?

TelMarine

Only those 2 games? Try other 3D accelerated games.

Talonrazor

I have zero problem with any other game.

Morkath

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the games again?
Try disabling any virtual drives you may have running as well.

Talonrazor

I've re-installed GTA:SA yes. I just installed Fable. I've got no virtual drives running.

Googling around reveals nothing. This is really fustrating.

Morkath

Any info you can give us about your system? Proc, vid card, amount of ram ect ect.

Talonrazor

AMD Athlon XP 2800
512 MB of RAM
Raedon 9800SE
Audigy 2 ZS

I can't get Fable to run at all. I'm making sure every driver is updated, slowly but surely.

This is really annoying.

Morkath

Any mods on GTA:SA? I heard if you have v2.0 of SA it won't start up with any mods installed. (Backlash from the hotcoffee incident).

Fable, dunno, only thing I can think of for that, is it requires winXP, but I assume you have that?

Talonrazor

Morkath wrote:

Any mods on GTA:SA? I heard if you have v2.0 of SA it won't start up with any mods installed. (Backlash from the hotcoffee incident).

Fable, dunno, only thing I can think of for that, is it requires winXP, but I assume you have that?

No mods.

Yes I have WinXP.

Morkath

Have you changed monitors since you had last installed/played the games? Perhaps they are set to a resolution/refresh that your current monitor no longer supports?
Try uninstalling, and making sure it is removing everything from the registry/HD before reinstalling. Basically make sure it isn't keeping any settings/config saved.

Could also try to delete gta_sa.set in your My Documents>GTA User File, according to one post I found.

Cronus

Do you have the latest patches for the game? Did uninstalling and reinstalling the game change anything?

Talonrazor

I'll try patching the game.

I've got the game installed to the secondary harddrive, if patching doesn't work then I'll uninstall it and install it on C.

eternalbl

What about DXdiag? Tried running that? I dunno what you'd look for specifically, but its worth a shot to get more info.

Talonrazor

Fuck Fable. I can't get this thing to work at all. And now, it jams everytime I go to uninstall.

I've spent seven hours trying to get this thing to work and I give up. I'm going out tomorrow to get a game I can actually do something with, goddamn it.

Cronus

If it won't even uninstall you should just delete the Fable folder and try a fresh install. I have no idea how your problem occured. It may have just been another victim of bad porting, but either way you really got screwed by it here. Sorry dude. Hopefully this shit will get better with Vista games.

Mike99TA

Sounds to me like your OS is severely borked, even if other games work.

If you can't even uninstall Fable without freezing it has nothing to do with the game itself, and everything to do with other base parts of your operating system.

Go ahead and buy another game but if more start "not working" you may want to format/reinstall windows. (well you COULD try a repair install but that is just messy to me)

Cronus

Mike99TA wrote:

Sounds to me like your OS is severely borked, even if other games work.

If you can't even uninstall Fable without freezing it has nothing to do with the game itself, and everything to do with other base parts of your operating system.

Go ahead and buy another game but if more start "not working" you may want to format/reinstall windows. (well you COULD try a repair install but that is just messy to me)

No, there is a good chance that it is Fable. The install probably got corrupted. Either a registry setting got changed, the .exe for Fable got changed or a necessary file for the uninstall got moved or changed. Anyone of those things will make the uninstall fail. Usually it pops up an error message, but if the uninstaller is poorly written or has a bug it may freeze under those conditions.

He should then manually uninstall Fable by deleting all the game files and all of the registry keys. I asked him to only delete the files as I don't like to tell people to muck about in the registry if they haven't already done so. I still grant that there may be a problem with Windows, but if Fable is the only game where this is happening then it is most likely just Fable.

Talonrazor

Alright, bumping this. My problems have expanded.

Snagged Dawn of War: Gold Edition on after-Christmas sales. It has DoW and DoW:WA. DoW plays fine and kicks ass. However, when I try to open up DoW:WA, nothing happens. Just like Fable and GTA:SA. A process starts for maybe half a second and shuts down, no harddrive activity or anything.

All drivers (video, audio, DirectX) are updated and current. Fable:LC and DoW and DoW:WA are installed on a secondary HD while GTA:SA is installed on primary.

This is driving me nuts guys.

Pancake

Talonrazor wrote:

Alright, bumping this. My problems have expanded.

Snagged Dawn of War: Gold Edition on after-Christmas sales. It has DoW and DoW:WA. DoW plays fine and kicks ass. However, when I try to open up DoW:WA, nothing happens. Just like Fable and GTA:SA. A process starts for maybe half a second and shuts down, no harddrive activity or anything.

All drivers (video, audio, DirectX) are updated and current. Fable:LC and DoW and DoW:WA are installed on a secondary HD while GTA:SA is installed on primary.

This is driving me nuts guys.

This won't help you with the other games, but I couldn't get DoW: WA to start until I completely patched DoW to the latest version. You can either do this manually or go into multiplayer and then clicking on online and it should do it automatically, I believe.

Talonrazor

Pancake wrote:

Talonrazor wrote:

Alright, bumping this. My problems have expanded.

Snagged Dawn of War: Gold Edition on after-Christmas sales. It has DoW and DoW:WA. DoW plays fine and kicks ass. However, when I try to open up DoW:WA, nothing happens. Just like Fable and GTA:SA. A process starts for maybe half a second and shuts down, no harddrive activity or anything.

All drivers (video, audio, DirectX) are updated and current. Fable:LC and DoW and DoW:WA are installed on a secondary HD while GTA:SA is installed on primary.

This is driving me nuts guys.

This won't help you with the other games, but I couldn't get DoW: WA to start until I completely patched DoW to the latest version. You can either do this manually or go into multiplayer and then clicking on online and it should do it automatically, I believe.

:^: I'll try that and if it works, you are awesome.

Looked for patches on Fable:LC and couldn't find any.

FreddyD

Can you post your specs? For example, some games won't run on an SCSI drive due to protection measures.

JWFokker

Sounds like your OS or drivers are fucked. Reinstall Windows.

apotheos

I wonder if all these games use the same copy protection scheme and the drivers for it are fucked, or perhaps by extensions something very subtle is wrong with your CD drive that causes it to throw up its arms in frustration.

So for example if they use Starforce I'd dig up a de-Starforce utility and clean that out and reinstall one of the games to get proper drivers for that back.

If you use any drive imaging stuff like Alcohol 120% that could be causing similar issues.

FyreWulff

apotheos wrote:

I wonder if all these games use the same copy protection scheme and the drivers for it are fucked, or perhaps by extensions something very subtle is wrong with your CD drive that causes it to throw up its arms in frustration.

So for example if they use Starforce I'd dig up a de-Starforce utility and clean that out and reinstall one of the games to get proper drivers for that back.

If you use any drive imaging stuff like Alcohol 120% that could be causing similar issues.

I was about to post something like this. Red Alert 2 is a bitch to get running because it's safedisc protection is fucked.

Cronus

apotheos wrote:

I wonder if all these games use the same copy protection scheme and the drivers for it are fucked, or perhaps by extensions something very subtle is wrong with your CD drive that causes it to throw up its arms in frustration.

So for example if they use Starforce I'd dig up a de-Starforce utility and clean that out and reinstall one of the games to get proper drivers for that back.

If you use any drive imaging stuff like Alcohol 120% that could be causing similar issues.

Apo is right about the imaging software, as some copy protection schemes will keep the game from running if they detect one. Otherwise you could just have a messed up Windows install. I'm sorry to say that, but if all of your drivers are up to date, and you don't have any imaging programs running, that's what the symptoms are pointing to. Maybe someone else will have another idea, but either way I will keep an eye on this thread and help you out.

Aero

A while back I bought FEAR and it refused to install. The errors it gave and the help online I found were doing nothing to help, but it turns out my CD drive at the time was just messed up. Especially since it was the only game that wasn't working right... I went out and bought a DVD drive and everything worked fine. Just for the record, I did buy the CD version of FEAR, so it wasn't incompatiabilities fault =P

Try using a different optical drive.

Talonrazor

Cronus wrote:

apotheos wrote:

I wonder if all these games use the same copy protection scheme and the drivers for it are fucked, or perhaps by extensions something very subtle is wrong with your CD drive that causes it to throw up its arms in frustration.

So for example if they use Starforce I'd dig up a de-Starforce utility and clean that out and reinstall one of the games to get proper drivers for that back.

If you use any drive imaging stuff like Alcohol 120% that could be causing similar issues.

Apo is right about the imaging software, as some copy protection schemes will keep the game from running if they detect one. Otherwise you could just have a messed up Windows install. I'm sorry to say that, but if all of your drivers are up to date, and you don't have any imaging programs running, that's what the symptoms are pointing to. Maybe someone else will have another idea, but either way I will keep an eye on this thread and help you out.

Yea, gertbeef in IRC mentioned this idea and I tried it. Ran a de-Starforce utility from some place called online security. How can I double check and ensure that it's completely gone?

Specs were posted in the beginning of the thread.

I'm due to replace the computer's HD, it's got about ten years on it so it needs to get chucked and replaced. I'll be doing this at the end of the month and will try a good reinstall then.

Shujaa

If you have the latest DoW/WA patches installed, they don't run CD checks.

I'm surprised DoW runs but WA doesn't, since they're on the same engine.

Cronus

Shujaa wrote:

If you have the latest DoW/WA patches installed, they don't run CD checks.

I'm surprised DoW runs but WA doesn't, since they're on the same engine.

It seems like a problem with the Windows install, most likely DirectX as it is only affecting some of his games, and not his OS at all. Unfortunately DirectX has become so ingrained within Windows it is extraordinarily difficult to reinstall DirectX. A clean install of Windows will fix the problem if my assessment is correct.