Mike Dragon

So a couple days I posted this: https://forum.truckersmp.com/index.php?/profile/666-mike-dragon/&status=117754&type=status and said that on the next day (Wednesday) I would start working on that "project". And well, I did!

 

 

Everything worked fine last time the computer was used, over a year ago, however now it presents the following symptoms:

 

- When playing Need for Speed Most Wanted, Windows XP will blue screen in a very funky way if the player is caught by the police and the cutscene of arrest attempts to play.

 

- Windows Millennium Edition won't launch most games. You click to open a game and it either does nothing or the screen flashes black for a moment as if the game is starting but then it goes back to the Desktop. And the few games that do start, will crash Windows.

- Need for Speed II Special Edition does not run from the ISO on either version of like it used to. On XP, the game process starts and runs in the background (you can see it on Task Manager) but the game never shows on the screen. Windows keeps running as if the game was never started.

- Some simple actions may crash Windows ME for no real reason. C'mon, that OS is not that unstable.

 

So with these issues in mind I set off to troubleshoot, starting off by double checking the settings of the processor. Since I upgraded from the old Athlon XP 2000+ to the Athlon XP 3200+ I had a feeling that the processor might not have been properly set up in the BIOS. Because there are two models of 3200+ and the motherboard's automatic settings for the 3200+ are for the other model that I don't have, I have to manually configure the processor so the motherboard knows what it is working with but just to be sure I took off the processor and double checked if it was the 2.33GHz version or the 2.2GHz. It is the 2.33GHz one, as I remembered, so after looking it up online to make sure I was doing the right thing and after trying out many different settings, in the end, there is only one setting that will work and its the one I had been using all along since I bought this processor, so my suspicions that the processor could be accidentally over or underclocked were debunked. I ruled out the possibility of the problems being caused by processor instability.

 

So I tested the RAM. Two 1GB sticks of DDR 400 memory and thankfully, neither popped any errors on Memtest. Hard drives could be faulty, maybe? With CrystalDisk Info and HD Tune I tested all three and only one gave out a warning sign, the Master drive. Well, fair enough, I found a problem. Maybe this is it! To spare time I cloned that drive into one of the other two drives and removed it then booted from the clone and tested the games on both OSs again to check if the issue was being caused by the hard drive.

 

Sadly, the exact same problems continued.  I tested the PSU and even replaced it by one I know for sure is fine and the problems still persisted. Next thing I'd have to replace to test was the graphics card and hey! Need for Speed Most Wanted played the arrest cutscene and kept on working without triggering any blue screens with the test card!  Faulty GPU, maybe? Well, I'll get back to that later... The blue screen on Windows XP was the only thing that I've managed to fix, this far other than identifying a faulty HD. Everything else was still borked all the same. So after a blue screen on Windows ME during boot, I formatted everything.

 

At this point I thought that maybe the two OSs could be corrupted due to their original hard drive being faulty and those issues would obviously be carried over to the "new" drive in the cloning process, so a clean install of them would solve that. So I formatted the drive, installed ME and XP in dual boot and went to test the games, again. Oh boy...

 

Need for Speed II SE still refused to work from the ISO as it should but oddly enough, it runs flawlessly from the physical CD. Even the home-made copy I made to avoid any damages to the original (the one in the photo is the original, though). King of The Road refuses to install. It always gives an error saying that it can't copy some file. The weird thing with this one is that the exact same error happens with both the ISO install and the physical CD install. Even weirder is the fact that on XP, it installs and runs perfectly fine from both medias! O.o The Need for Speed SE (the special edition of the very first NFS) would also give an error during install on ME and not work. This one I can't even try on XP because it is so old. Hard Truck Road to Victory installs and runs from both the ISO and CD just fine, though, as does The Fifth Element. I suspected that Windows ME wasn't happy with 2 GB of RAM in the system, so I removed some but all to no avail. It would still behave the same way. Regarding Windows ME, I am about out of ideas, at this point, so I moved on to Windows XP.

 

Remember that I said I'd get back to the GPU possibly being faulty, later? Well, I popped the original graphics card back in (256 MB GeForce 6200) and decided to give it another try with Most Wanted as I refused to believe this card is defective after all these years of good service and guess what? It worked flawlessly on NFS with a clean install of Windows XP! Maybe the driver in the old install was corrupted (even though I installed a new version during one of the previous tests) or Windows itself was, who knows. The good news is that just like the processor, RAM, PSU, the motherboard itself, I am sure, the hard drives and Windows installation, the graphics card is also in good shape. NFSIISE doesn't work on XP, by the way. It still refused to work on XP, even with physical media. Though I could swear I have played it under Windows XP, back in the day.  But at least Most Wanted and King of The Road work perfectly well on XP, now!

 

So Windows XP runs two of the main games just fine and the OS itself seems to be alright, now. That's great, but I still am left with the games that are not working on ME. I could use Windows 98 instead, but that one lacks true native USB support, it doesn't look as nice and doesn't have some nice features that ME has. Besides, it is even clunkier than ME in some aspects and would give me an even greater headache to get it to work with 2GB of RAM. Windows ME could be presenting these issues because of the RAM capacity, yes, but like I said before, I tested with less RAM and it still continued to "misbehave". Besides, last time I used this computer, Windows ME and all the games in it were working perfectly well with the 2GB it has and nothing other than have the PC still with no use for several months has changed, since then.

 

Given that I am mostly out of ideas, I went back to considering replacing this Athlon XP system by the Pentium 4 I was playing with a few weeks back. My concern with doing that is that the motherboard does not have Windows 98/ME drivers for download. That would mean that I'd have to sacrifice playing some of my old games again, such as Hard Truck and The Fifth Element, since those will only run on Windows 95, 98 and ME. Still, I put the Athlon XP aside and set up the Pentium 4, but I used the Athlon's hard drives instead.

 

While the computer was booting up I was preparing the install CDs for Windows XP and ME to format the Master hard drive and install them again from scratch on the Pentium 4. Why? Because it's a very different and newer platform than that Athlon XP where they were installed, originally. The chipset of the motherboard is different and when you move a Windows install from one motherboard to another that is different, it normally won't boot and instead, will give you a blue screen of death. So that's what I was expecting. Though Windows XP was taking a bit long to blue screen... its boot screen was still running and to my surprise, it booted into Windows and it started to detect and install the components of the "new" motherboard! O.o I guess those boards are not all that different, after all! Looking into Device Manager I noticed that apparently they have quite similar controllers, enough for Windows to "make itself comfortable" on the new motherboard. Huh... neat! But what REALLY caught me by surprise is that Windows ME, not only booted and did not blue screen, but like XP, it also installed drivers for the new board! O.o And remember, this is a motherboard that does not officially support Windows ME! There are no drivers for this Windows version on the site of its maker!

 

So after installing the driver for the graphics on both OSs (the graphics card has drivers for Windows 9x, as well) and installing the actual chipset drivers for the motherboard on Windows XP (it was working fine but the PS/2 keyboard driver kept on dying, for some reason. Install the proper chipset driver solved that issue) I went to test all the games again. And they run great! Well, the ones that do run, that is. Everything is still the same as it was on the Athlon XP. The only difference is that Most Wanted runs smoothly on the Pentium 4. lol Well, it is a more powerful processor than the Athlon XP, after all.

 

At any rate, this new development I uncovered is great! If this motherboard (Gigabyte GA-VM800PMC), which doesn't officially support Windows ME, according to Gigabyte's site, does actually support Windows ME, then it means that I can replace the Athlon XP system by the Pentium 4 system. I'd rather have both at the same time but I lack the space in my house for yet another PC.  Anyway... I basically just need to sort out the issue with running games off their ISOs instead of physical media but other than that, I can run King of the Road on Windows XP alongside Need for Speed Most Wanted along with a couple others that might not be compatible with ME or might refuse to install there but will install and run on XP and then leave Windows ME to handle the games that only it can run, such as The Fifth Element, Hard Truck Road to Victory, One Unity Blood and a few others. I'd have a faster old computer to play old games without actually sacrificing any of them, as I was fearing. This is something I have yet to decide for sure, though.

 

This all happened in the span of two days, by the way. I am not done, obviously. The decision to replace these systems is yet to be taken for sure, though. Later today (28th) I will do a few final (hopefully final) tests with the Pentium 4 motherboard. I will format Windows ME and install it from scratch on this motherboard and try to install the drivers myself to see how that goes. If they install and work normally, then that should be the green light I need to make that decision. If that happens, then I can finally put my good old Athlon XP to rest for good. If that happens, then I'll have a lot of work ahead of me. Manage how I will distribute the hard drives, which ones will get which Windows (I'll likely not dual boot them, this time), which will get a second partition for files or if both will for both Windows, etc., install all the games on both versions and configure and update them both.

 

Phew! This is a very long status post. O.o I am sorry. I guess I got carried away. lol I don't really have anyone to talk to and share this kind of stuff with so I tend to build it up inside a lot. Heh... If you have read through this all then you are a real human bean!

 

Looking forward to the outcome of this third day of work on my old rig. If I migrate to the Pentium 4, I might invest on a couple more upgrades for it, soon as I can. Replace the two 512 MB of 533MHz DDR2 RAM for two 1 GB 533 MHz DDR2 RAM would be nice. I have 1 GB DDR2 RAM, but it's of a higher frequency than the motherboard supports, so it only reads half of it. To give it 2 GB I will have to install RAM at 533MHz. Upgrade the graphics card to something better for that AGP slot would be really nice, as well.

 

 

Oh, by the way... while looking through some files, I found this. I suppose that anyone who's been there during the current WoT event might relate to it, somehow. Especially if they are Game Moderators.