Desperate for Help-Win7 and XP Mode

[darksider282]

Hi folks. First off, love this site, this forum, and this game. One of the greatest games ever, IMO.

I've been trying to get this game to run for the past day or so on a Windows 7 PC. I got the game to work fine except: invisible capital ship bug. Updating video drivers didn't help, and there's precious little information out there about what might fix this one that I could find.

So finally I bit the bullet and decided to install the virtual pc xp mode. Read that it should work fine there.

Only it doesn't. The game loads, but not properly. The game screen is crunched into the top left quarter of the window, and the second any tactical ship combat starts (once again, it's the ship combat...) The game crashes with a myriad of messages starting with a "The pixel format was invalid as specified" followed by several "Action not supported" messages when I CTL-ALT-Delete and then an "Access to this surface is being refused because the surface memory is gone. The DirectDrawSurface object representing this surface should have Restore called on it." error. I was finally able to get it to run properly in the xp mode by disabling integration features-at which point the invisible capital ship bug returned.

I'm out of ideas, and close to giving up on ever playing this again.

[MrPhildevil]

Is that 64 bits, or 32 bits?

[darksider282]

32 bit

[MrPhildevil]

Damn, should be working. I myself have W7 32-bit and its working fine. Not using any XP mode.

[darksider282]

Now you understand my frustration and the difficulty I've had diagnosing this. It *should* be working on Win7 and it *definately* should be working in XP mode, and yet...

It seems like a problem with the graphics card or drivers or something, but I have the same capital ship bug on my wife's computer, which is identical in every way except that she has a different graphics card. Not even the same manufacturer, mine is NVidia and her's is ATI.

[darksider282]

FIXED---

 

I had seen somewhere where it said to put the D3DRM.DLL file into the Rebellion folder. This is not correct, at least for my system. When I put the file into the Windows/System32 file as per instructions in the wiki http://www.swrebellion.com/wiki/Rebellion:Windows_Vista (thanks Evaders99 for getting it back online!) and *removed it from the Rebellion folder* the invisible capital ship bug was resolved. Before removing it from the Rebellion folder the capital ships were still invisible, it must be in the System32 folder and *not* in the Rebellion folder. I did not have to register the file like the wiki says, just putting it into the folder works.

This was on Windows 7 32 bit.

 

Any body having the invisible capital ship problem, give this a shot!

[Slocket]

That is strange. But if it works, that is a good find. Another mystery of Microsoft Windows comes to light.

[darksider282]

The joys of Windows...

 

Setting up on my wife's system (identical rig) I also determined that it needs to be the D3DRM.DLL from the wiki link on this site, the one off the Rebellion CD is no good. So that could have been it as well.

[MrPhildevil]

Glad you could figure that out. By the way, perhaps Evader or someone else could sticky this?