Hello, I recently pulled out my ToEE with hopes of playing again. Unfortunately the game is now completely unplayable on my newer updated hardware. It used to run poorly last year but now I can't play it at all. I've got an AMD64 3000+ with 1G of memory, tons of HD space, and a Nvidia 5900 so the hardware speed can't possibly be the problem. I am running XP pro with SP2 and dx9c. There are no viruses or spyware/maleware on my machine. All the drivers are the latest. I've followed the patching instructions here, installing the official patches 1 & 2, the Co8 patch, the Mobieus temple .dll, and then Livonya's patch. The problem is at certain points in the game it slows down immensly to be unplayable. It is running so slow that I can't even click on any buttons or move the mouse. Pressing escape won't ever bring up the command to quit out. This appears to happen the most in outdoor areas where the 'bugs' or 'lights' are. The bugs around trees become so thich you can't see through them, the green bugs in the moathouse outside become solid green lines, torches/lights/fireplaces become solid balls of white flame. And this causes my framerate to drastically drop. It is as if the old bugs/lights modles/pics are never being removed or overwriten so they eventually become constant blocks on the screen. It is kind of hard to describe. Oh, and smoke from the chimneys does this too. I would be dropped down to 1.5fps or worse (it felt worse). I've turned all the settings down I can find to no effect. If I quicksaved and reloaded the problem would be fixed for a few seconds but the frame rate would steadly drop till it was unplayable. The lights at the start of the game in the city did this. Instead of the nice circle some of them were solid globes of white. The bugs right at the start of Hommlet showed this. The bugs in the woods showed this behavior. The castle construction area in Hommlet was almost impossible to navigate. Some of my party members got left behind or eventually refused to move at all. I was forced to reload. The labor camp in Hommlet showed this too. It was impossible to navigate around in. The frogs around the moathouse were almost impossible. If I had the bugs on the screen, I couldn't play. I finally had to zoom by them and rush into the castle itself. Once in the castle things were pretty much ok. I went to the fields and as soon as I met a skeleton the game slowed down and basically froze. I would click someone to move (which took a while) and they would never move. At this point I finally gave up. The game wasn't this bad when I first got it. It was slow but playable. If it had been I would have returned it. Does anyone have any ideas what might be going on? Any help you can give is greatly appreciated. I like the game and want to play it but I can't play it like this. Is one of the patches causing this? I've checked the forum for similar problems and haven't found any. Thanks PomPomLover
Click on options, video preferences and see what the gamma is. It shouldn't be over 3, but make it 0 and see what changes. If no change, then uninstall the game completely and check and see if there is anything in the registry. Do regedit and delete it if there is. CAUTION: yOU HAVE TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL HERE. Install the game and check it. If okay then do the Atari patches. Check it. If it's bad with no patches at all, then buy a new cd. They're cheap anyway. Keep adding the fixes one at a time. You may have gotten a bad download,also. If the problem is gone it was one of the patches. If it's in one of the patches it will show back up. If it was a hardware/video card problem it would effect everything, allgames and stuff.
