Sorry if this has been asked before but Arcanum won't work!

I bought a new computer (windows 64-bit) in august 2008 and the first game i installed was Arcanum, it worked perfectly.
Today i tried installing it again and before installing any patches, wanted to try it to see if it works, but after i clicked 'Play', the screen turned black and stayed black, i had to reset the computer.
Installed the Official Arcanum patch, tried it again, same thing.
Went throught the forums, read that i should right click the arcanum.exe icon and do some stuff, did everything, tried it again, same thing, black screen.
So anyone care to help me?

 

Do other games work properly? Because maybe you video card causes problems, isn't installed properly or has corrupted software because of some viral infection. if other games don't cause such problems, then hm, do you have spare disc space on the partition on which Arcanum is installed? Maybe it doesn't have enough ease to work properly.

 

WoW works perfectly as well as The Witcher, should i have DirectX installed?

 

Whaaa... Well, akhem, of course you should, you always should. But since Wow and The Witcher work, you propably already have a good enough version of DirectX for Arcanum to work. Still, it won't hurt to install the latest one if you haven't already. Everything's worth a try.

EDIT: One more thing. Did you install Arcanum exactly the same way as in 2008? Some versions may require a DVD patch or something like that (which is in those situations on the game disc) and refuse to work otherwise.

 

Still didn't work, and yes i don't think i did anything different before damn it i just reseted the computer for the 5th time this morning :s

 

OK, well, do you still have the same operating system? I didn't read those posts, but I've seen here and there treads about Arcanum having problem with Vista. Possibly even XP, but I personally never did experiance those. Also, sometimes Windows Service Packs screw the working of games (I never installed on my XP anything above SP1 since there are at least a few gemes I like which won't run when they're installed).

 

Yeah it's the same computer, never changed anything, no idea what's hapening :s
Even vanilla arcanum should work no?

 

If it did previously, yeah.
Of course you could try to reinstall Arcanum, since nothing else works anyway. Maybe something gone wrong during the instalation.

 

Did that already anything else i should be aware of?

 

Nothing that I'm aware of. But I'm no professional nor did I ever had similar problems. Perhaps someone with decent knowledge in the matter will show up and help you.

 

I hoped the thread I made would be sufficient to deter people from posting threads like this. No matter. You sent me a message, so I suppose I'll help (read: try to). Firstly, on the off chance you haven't done so, please follow everything in my guide made. It doesn't seem to be super useful, but hopefully getting it to run for you will change that. I now need the following:

Computer Manufacturer:
Processor Speed:
RAM:
Pron downloaded/week (Gb):
Operating System:
Service Pack:
DirectX Version:

 

Run it as administrator.

 

I always do mate, the screens just turn black, anyway for DarkFool:
Computer Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard Company
Processor Speed: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9300 @ 2.50GHz 2.50 GHz
RAM: 4.00
Pron downloaded/week (Gb): dunno what that is :s
Operating System: 64 bits
Service Pack: 1
DirectX Version: after executing dxdiag, i'm sure now i have DirectX 10

 

When you installed the officail Arcanum patch, did you choose the correct directory? That patch doesn't auto-detect your Arcanum folder.

 

Yes of course but it's not a patch problem, but even with no patches installed, Arcanum should logically work, yet it doesn't, i always get a black screen and i have to reset every time :/

 

If DF can't come up with anything you could always try running it in safe mode.

 

Wow. That's just... Wow. Someone on this planet is actually going to heaven. Yet how lonely he will be.

 

My next thought would be to try and run the game without any of the opening movies. The instant black screen makes me think it's a video-based error. Hopefully DBT or someone else who knows the game exceedingly intricately will swing by and tell me if it's possible to add a switch to the "launch" command and make it launch without starting any videos.

Somethings that should've been in my previous message:

What kind of video card? Who makes, model, memory?
Is anything o.c'ed?
Are you running Omega Video drivers, or anything similar that's "Non stock" ?

 

I'm actually french so it's hard enough translating technical words :s
Not running any drivers and my Graphic Card is a NVIDIA Gforce 9600 GS with 768 Mb