GF4 & games problem

[Dasaan]

first off my kit :
GF4 ti 4400 with 4191 drivers
AMD XP1600
Debian unstable
512Mb DDR
X4.2 - fluxbox
res - 1280x1024

Right I installed the packages for installing the drivers using apt and followed the readme.
I've altered my XF86config-4 also as per the readme.

- I've got X working.
- glxgears works fine and reports about ~4000 fps.
- All the sreensavers in xscreensaver that use openGL work and generally report at least 50fps.
- Tuxracer works and is pretty nippy.

But when it comes to some games such as mindrover, nwn beta 2 & 3 and heretic 2 things start to go a little pear shaped.

When I start these games a titlebar appears at the top of the screen and all the rest is black. I can hear the music from the games playing but I have no mouse pointer, and can't even use alt+/- to change res. The only way I've found to resolve this and get back into X safely is to change to a different tty such as 2 and do a kill -9 on the games process.

I've just found another application that does the same, zsnes

Now I can play the games, but it involves dropping out of X, cd'ing to the game's binary location and doing a xinit ./<games_name>.
When I do this I have no problems.

I'm sure it's something silly that I've overlooked, but I've googled, and checked on the various game's forums all to no avail.

I'm hoping someone will read this and think silly fool you should have done this ;) and put me out of my misery.

I really hope someone can help.

Thanks

Dasaan

[Cheshiremackat]

Ok... I'm out on a limb here but check your XF86 Config file and see how many resolutions/colour depths are supported...

I had a similar problem (I think) when I tried to play Wolfenstein in 640x480 and I had forgot to set the proper mode in my config file

Hope that helps

_CMK

[Dasaan]

I checked and I have all the conventional resolutions listed for 8, 16 and 24 bpp, so I don't think it's that unfortunately.

[Dasaan]

Right, I've set neverwinter nights up to run in a window and I'm getting no problems with that, also running zsnes in a window causes no problems. It would appear that I have a problem with running openGL stuff in a full screen. I hvae yet to try mindrover and heretic 2 in a window but I have a feeling that they would run just fine.

Now whilst it can be useful to run games in a window, it's sometimes nice to be able to run them fullscreen so if anyone has any more ideas then please feel free to suggest them. In the meantime I'll keep fiddling and searching for a solution.

[Wolfman [TWP]]

Try setting your GlDriver line in /homedir/.loki/heretic2/config.cfg file to:-

set gl_driver "/usr/lib/libGL.so.1"

I seem to be able to run it in full screen mode using this setting. And also make sure you remove the gl drivers from the /usr/local/games/heretic/gl_drivers directory otherwise it will keep trying to use them instead. I have my directroy empty. And it's working ok.

I'm running RH8.0, but I can't see why it won't run on Debian.

Wolf

[Dasaan]

Originally posted by Wolfman [TWP]
Try setting your GlDriver line in /homedir/.loki/heretic2/config.cfg file to:-

set gl_driver "/usr/lib/libGL.so.1"

I seem to be able to run it in full screen mode using this setting. And also make sure you remove the gl drivers from the /usr/local/games/heretic/gl_drivers directory otherwise it will keep trying to use them instead. I have my directroy empty. And it's working ok.

I'm running RH8.0, but I can't see why it won't run on Debian.

Wolf

I've just checked the files you mentioned and they are already set as you suggest and the gl_drivers directory is empty so it's not that. Thanks for trying though.

[Wolfman [TWP]]

So there are no *.so.* files in the /usr/local/games/heretic2/ directory at all??

If there are remove them, as I have had similar problems like this you are having too... Oh, and the other thing is, Did you upgrade to the latest patches using the Loki updater??

Wolf

[Dasaan]

Right heretic 2 seems to be working just fine now. I updated to version 1.06c - english from 1.06b and checked in the /usr/local/games/heretic2 directory for any iffy <foo>.so files. I found a file in there called ref_glx.so and renamed it to ref_glx.so.bak just in case I did need it. Started the game and it came up full screen with no problems at all.

Now all I have to do is try and get the other games to play nice with full screen :) I'm gonna check the mindrover folder in case there is a similar problem there but any other suggestions are greatly appreciated.

OK, I'm officially baffled. I've just retried nwn, mindrover and zsnes and they are working just fine, in full screen. So yep I'm baffled as to why they are now working, but happy that they are :) So a big thanks to everyone that helped

[Andy Mecham]

I think Heretic2 was the only game where we did that...

--andy