arcanum and windows xp

i had previously installed arcanum on my xp system and had no problems with it. my husband had to reformatt the hard drive and reinstall xp and sincew then i cannot get arcanum to start up. ( i reinstalled it after he reformatted the hard drive) is there a patch of some kind that helps or do i need to uninstall and try to play without any of the patches? :-?

 

What exactly kind of problem are you experiencing?

 

it will start up but as soon as it gets to the starting "movie" with the train as it is loading, : it will crash and burn. :cry:

 

while i may sound vague about a few things i have tried, i will say that reinstalling arcanum was the first second and third thing i tried. please excuse my outburst as i know that even in this computer age there are only a select few that are computer literate. i am one of those lucky few.



:extremely bitchy cause cant play arcanum yet:

 

It may be a video issue. Make sure your video card's drivers are updated. Also, make sure you have the latest version of DirectX.

 

Your video driver may be the heart of the issue. If you have an nVidia video card, be sure that you do NOT have the 56.64 version of the nVidia drivers installed because they will NOT allow Arcanum to run for some reason - I learned that the hard way. The 53.03 version is fine, but I don't know about anything after that since I've been a bit leery of trying any of the newer drivers since installing the 56.64 version made it impossible for me to run Arcanum. If that doesn't do it, look at your Anti-Aliasing settings and turn it off unless you absolutely must have it on for something because that is another thing that interferes with Arcanum. Those are the two major video issues that I know of that will absolutely keep you from running Arcanum. If you have a non-nVidia video card, take a look around the Sierra Arcanum forum for video issues concerning your card.

If you are installing any hacks or fixes, leave them out until you get it running, just to be sure that one of them is not responsible. Also, if you have any saved games, try leaving them out of the equation until you get the game running.

Good luck getting your game up and running and please let us know what worked.

 

I was right about to post this exact problem, and searches for "startup" and "freezing" etc weren't finding them. Funny that I see this right at the top. I'm trying to find my driver version right now, I use an nvidia card. I played through the game when it came out, and now it freezes right after the little train image.

Okay, it looks like I have the newest nvidia driver, 61.77 released July 27th 2004. So that's what's screwing me up? I don't see available older drivers.

/edit 1 by the way, I turned AA from application-controlled to Off, to no avail.

 

This isn't the Arcanum Fullscreen error either is it? Never ran into that, but I thought the symptoms were similar.

 

No, Blinky, this isn't the Arcanum Fullscreen error. :/ With this thing, Arcanum is set to run in normal mode, but it comes up and says that it can't write to memory location BLAH and shuts down. It's some change that nVidia made in their drivers that Arcanum does NOT like and it just won't run with the version I listed. Evidently Arcanum doesn't work with the nVidia driver version 61.77, either. :-x

I sent an email to nVidia tech support about it and got absolutely no response from them and they are evidently not going to change whatever they changed that is screwing things up. I'm not real happy with that attitude since I absolutely despise ATI video cards due to what I consider a severe lack of flexibility in their settings or user interface. :x :-x

If you read the Release Notes for v61.77 http://www.terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/post ... t&p=119035, you will be able to see some of the changes that they have made after version 53.03. Evidently, one of the additional functions that were added in the Release 55 series of drivers – see p24 of Release Notes – is responsible for the incompatibilities between the newer drivers and Arcanum.

As for where to get earlier versions of nVidia drivers, if you look at the sidebar on the download page for the 61.77 driver, you will see a black link for "Windows XP/2000 Driver Archive". Clicking on that will take you to a location where you can download older versions of their drivers. The specific location for the 53.03 driver is http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_53.03.html. I hope this helps anyone who is having this particular problem.

 

omg am i a ditz

ok so here it is 2 months and 1 new video card later and i decided to go ask arcanum.sierra.com what it might be. and there the answer is on the list of common questions.
gawd! i think i am going to create a totally ditzy character and see how quick i get killed. :-o

 

Hello To All

I have loved Arcanum since its birth, and now something is stoping me from loving it.
I boutght myself a new laptop, so i could play it @ work. But it does not start.
I have windows XP with Service Pack 1
The error i get is :
Unable to load Function: FT_Thunk(KERNEL32.DLL)

What should i do, please help me.

 

Well, it would have helped a lot to figure things out if you had told us a bit more about your system configurations, i.e., what cpu, video card, amount or RAM and size hard drive are on your laptop.

The first thing you should do is make sure that all your drivers are up to date, unless you have an nVidia video card/processor - then read my posts above about the latest driver that is compatible with Arcanum. If you are not sure how to check the date or version number on your drivers, you can get that information from the System Information program found in the Start\Programs\Accessories\System Tools Menu. If you have an nVidia driver later than the ones above installed, I strongly suggest that you download the older driver and install it instead to see if this solves your problem. Of course, if you don't have an nVidia video card/processor, then try the latest driver for what you have.

Make sure that you have the latest game patch installed as well and that you are not trying to run the game without the CD or with a copied CD, just to be sure that you are not introducing unnecessary variables. Are you playing the game with any hacks or modules installed? If so, you may want to do a complete uninstall and reinstall it with only the official patches to see if you can get it working before applying any of those. If that works, only install one module or hack at a time and test the game before installing any others. That way, if it is a hack or module responsible for the problem, you can identify which one is causing it.

I hope that this helps. If you figure out exactly what fixed it feel free to share it with us. If you need further help, please post your system configuration along with as much information about what patches and hacks you have installed on the game and what you have tried since your first post so that we don't suggest something you have already tried.

 

Hello there.

I am experiencing the same problem as other people - the game returns to system after the "Loading Arcanum" screen appears.

I have Windows XP Service Pack 2, Directx 9c and a nvidia card. I tried installing 53.03 or even 52.16 driver version as suggested but the problem has not disappear.

Is there any way I can play Arcanum on this operating system?

 

Sorry for the late reply but you missed an important issue. If you reformattted the HD then you had to reinstall the video dirvers and windows directx will be the original mode. Suggest you run window update and down load the version for your computer and then down load the video file update that matches the direct x version then arcanum should work.