swaaye

I've seen this on several occasions with nForce 2 boards. You should really not use dual channel unless you have 2 identical sticks of RAM (same size and brand). nForce is very particular about how it uses the RAM in dual channel and if the properties of the DIMMs are off in some way, it may result in the wierdest instability that won't show up in memtest)

Bump.

At least KOTOR2 runs better than EQ2! Now that game is an example of a real mess. I do agree with you whole heartedly though. KOTOR2 really seems to be an example of how not to make an OpenGL game, with all its graphical and performance issues. I don't subscribe to the "blame the hardware manufacturers" mindset. The drivers we are using on our NV & ATI cards are extremely refined, the result of years of development. Granted there are some bugs because this is a technology that is developing daily, but KOTOR2 is 3 yr old tech and should be refined more than it is.

Hey guys, I have some ideas for you. I realize that this game is quite buggy, but a lot of you seem to get far more crashes than I. In fact, the game only crashed for me in the beginning area. It has not crashed at all for at least 4 hours gameplay now. So, I would like you people with crash issues to run some programs on your computers for me, to test stability of your system. First of all, you need to try Memtest86+. Go download the precompiled, bootable ISO and burn it on a CD using Nero (or whatever). Boot your computer with this CD (you may need to go into your BIOS setup and set CDROM to boot before HDD) and let it run at least 1 pass (a pass is around 9 separate tests I believe). It will likely take at least 30mins, depending on how much RAM you have. This program is extremely capable at finding RAM errors. If you get ANY red errors listed, you have a RAM issue and that is a huge stability problem. RAM instability can cause blue screens, but more often will cause programs to crash randomly. Perhaps you or your BIOS set your RAM timings too aggressively (happens a lot). If you are running CAS 2.5, RAS to CAS 3, RAS Precharge 3, RAS Active 7, (for example), try 3-4-4-9 instead and move each setting up until you get errors again. Or try a fail-safe memory option if your BIOS has things like that. Also you could try upping RAM voltage to around 2.6-2.7v (default is 2.55v usually). If you get errors no matter what you change, one of your DIMMs is probably defective. Secondly, let's test your CPU stability. For this you want Prime95. Download the program from that link and load it up. You want to stress test. First go to the Options menu and to CPU. Note your L2 cache size. Now, go to the Options menu again and hit Torture Test. In there, first select Small FFTs, then switch to Custom. This will put the settings for the Small FFTs CPU test in the Custom boxes. Here you need to set the Max FFT size to the size of your CPU's L2 cache. Next you should shut down as many background programs in your taskbar as possible, and close all applications you are running except Prime95. You want Prime to get as much CPU time as possible. Now hit ok and let it run for at least 30 mins, or even overnight. Prime95 will run indefinitely provided it doesn't ever see a math error. If it gives a math error at any point your CPU is not stable. It may be overheating (Prime95 will get your CPU hotter than any regular program so it really tests cooling). Or you may have the wrong voltage set. Or you overclocked too much and need more CPU voltage/cooling at that speed. Prime95 can also be used to test overall system stability using the Blend torture test. But, I find Memtest86+ to be better at Prime for RAM testing and separating CPU testing from RAM testing is better anyway. If you want to try Blend you need to hit blend, then go to custom and turn down the "memory to use". It will default too high and will end up swapping too much which will result in inadequate testing CPU usage and not give you any useful testing other than grinding your hard drive. You can monitor whether your CPU is at 100% by bringing up Task Manager (in XP/2000, Ctrl-Alt-Delete) or System Monitor in Windows 98/ME (Accessories). Ok, those are two really good ways to figure out if your computer is stable. Prime is a program I've used for years, but Memtest86+ is fairly new and for the 6-months I've been using it it has proven to be excellent at diagnosing RAM issues. Give them a go! Addendum: Another worthy concern regarding random reboots and crashes is the potential that you have an inadequate power supply. AthlonXPs should have at least 300W, and 350W+ is ideal. You need a quality power supply too. A P4's needs vary but 300W is absolute minimum. Athlon64s and P4 3Ghz+ should have 400W+, IMO. These top end CPUs emit around 150W of heat when they are working, that heat is from the electricity they are using. Throw in a high end video card and you are soon well over 200W continuous power, and then you have to add drives and PCI cards! Power supplies are rated for their peak power rating usually, not continuous power (which is often little more than half their peak rating). Also, the power supplies that come with DIY cases are generally VERY cheap, even though they may have a great "rating". One way to identify cheapness is by its weight. If it is very light, it's almost certainly junk. Good power supply brands are: Antec, Enermax, PC Power & Cooling, and some Thermaltake supplies (420W Purepower is good). If you own a OEM PC such as a Dell, HP, Compaq, etc, you may have a very low wattage power supply. My brother's Dell P4 has a mere 250W supply which would likely become inadequate if he upgrade his graphics card. This is something you need to watch. If you upgraded your OEM PC to one of the modern graphics cards, you probably went above what your power supply can handle. A friend of mine upgraded his Gateway P4 from a GF4MX to a Radeon 9700 and started to get lockups and reboots. We looked at his power supply, and it was a 145W (!!!!). Needless to say, that was not enough power for a Radeon 9700 + P4 system.

The more I play, the more I wish the music was encoded better. The game has an excellent soundtrack that sounds like Star Wars, and it fits the mood of the game perfectly. Hell, it sets the mood as far as I'm concerned. The only weakness of the composition is that it loops quite a bit in some areas, and it looks a bit too noticeably. But, damn, I wish they'd give us a better quality version!

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum...topic.php?t=647

Piracy may be bad, but so is what LucasArts did to this game. It certainly is NOT worth MSRP right now. Should be in the bargain bin already lol.

I usually use Driver Cleaner myself, but I doubt that it's necessary. Just using ATI's uninstall option in Add/Remove Programs should be more than enough. When you install the new drivers it will overwrite old files anyway. I don't think I've ever seen mixed up drivers with the current uninstallers ATI builds in. Also, if you want to play with various OpenGL driver versions, you can copy the atioglxx.dll file from the windows/system32 folder. This is the OpenGL ICD (installable client driver). You can backup these files from various Catalyst installations. To use them just put them in the KOTOR2 folder renamed to OpenGL32.dll. Should work. We used to do that with KOTOR1 so you could use the Cat 4.2 OGL ICD with later Catalyst drivers and not be stuck with the older drivers for other games.

Xbox's Dolby Digital encoder is a very capable hardware-based DSP that more than gets the job done, and with VERY low latency. It is by far the best audio solution in any of the current consoles. Trust me, it can play back 48Khz, 16-bit audio with NO problem (in fact 64 parallel streams of 3D audio at once!) nForce/nForce 2 have the same DSP if you get the MCP-T southbridge. Unfortunately this chip has had driver problems from the beginning and has to deal with DirectX audio instead of whatever is in Xbox (probably a down to the metal API). It does work very well for the most part though. A friend of mine uses it for Dolby Digital 5.1 thru an optical cable to his receiver. There is absolutely no latency I could detect in 3D games when using Dolby Digital. I believe it supports EAX 2, but Sensaura is its primary 3D Sound algorithm. The developers have some nifty tools to design placement of 3D sounds. Aw well. It's probably a pipe dream that LEC will re-encode the music. But it would sure be nice, and a great gesture on their part. Along with some bug fixes!

Yes, sometimes the enemies are VERY easy. Droids are pathetic especially, usually. Then you'll run into a battle and find that you can't hit anything without 5-10 attack attmepts. I picked Jedi Guardian (the warrior) and I expect to lay waste with melee weapons a lot better than I usually do! The game is pretty. It sounds good. The music is very atmospheric (if a bit loopy and disappointingly low-resolution). But, the actual gameplay is VERY buggy and unbalanced. If playing the game wasn't like reading a good book, I'd have quit long ago. But the damned storyline is fantastic with a lot of intrigue, mystery, and enemies that don't always seem evil, etc. This game deserved more time. It could have been literally THE definitive Star Wars title to beat. But, no, it's mostly an annoying mess that was very rushed.

This whole KOTOR2 situation is really appalling. I mean, the game hardly works right (just last night I lost my companions and had to blast thru a TON of bad guys all alone. They just vanished after a quest and did not appear again until I got down onto the surface of Telos). The graphics engine is a complete mess with random stutters appearing and disappearing when you leave an area. Messed up polygons, missing textures, you name it. Though it doesn't crash much, if ever, for me believe it or not. Not since the beginning of the game. And then there's the music. Is this just carelessness or the most questionable artistic decision in history? I'd hope for the former. The latter may be a possibility though if they wanted to really make the music less for the foreground and more for background sound: make it less obvious and more atmospheric?? I can't see why anyone would want to do that though. I play the game a lot thru headphones on an Audigy 2 ZS and I didn't come looking for an AM radio experience. And, if this was carelessess why did the person who encoded it use LAME? LAME is the best encoder for MP3 in existence really, and it's not a really well known encoder because it's free and open source and doesn't come with any big name tools that I know of. So, this person had to look this up to use it. Then this person used some horrific settings.... The only reason why I can imagine you'd want to use such a horribly low lowpass filter is to save bitrate for the remaining spectrum....but why encode it so low in the first place? And why mono? LAME has just AWESOME presets that you can use. The soundtrack sure would have sounded fabulous if "--alt-preset standard" had been used. It's obvious that the encoding person had no idea how to really take advantage of LAME, and also must have been a rookie at MP3 encoding in general. To save disk space? Nope, there is ~80MB less on CD4 than the other 3 disks. 80MB would more than double the alloted space for the music as it is now. AND, don't you think it's time for DVD? KOTOR 1 deserved a DVD release. DVD drives have been sold in all major OEM machines for YEARS now. Enthusiasts adopted DVD-ROMs around 1999! 6 YEARS AGO! The only excuse here is to cut costs. Sad. I simply can't comprehend the decisions made. edit: Let me include 2 links for LAME. Just in case the info is useful to someone at LEC or Obsidian. http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=28123 http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=28124

A cheap powersupply is a univerally bad idea. I once had a 400 watt supply that came with a case. This supply literally burned out after 20 mins in a simple Athlon XP system with a GF6800. Go out and buy a new supply. It's one of the most important parts of your system! The cheapest supply I'd recommend, and one that has worked great for me for over a year now, is the Thermaltake Silent Purepower 420W. Otherwise look at Antec or Enermax.

Back in June I came here and requested that we get some widescreen resolutions with the game, because I play it on my notebook PC and many users play it on HDTV sets. So, guess what, it appears that I and others from the widescreen gaming forum (http://www.widescreengamingforum.com) were completely ignored. Anyway, I've figured out that the game's INI file will accept 1280x768 for whatever reason. It however ignores all other widescreen resolutions that I (and others) have tried. 1280x768 won't work right on my notebook's LCD. 1280x800 is the ticket to true joy for me. Does anyone have any info on widescreen in the game or ways to get the game to go to different resolutions?

As the kids say... True 'Dat. Here is an article that pretty much confirms what a lot of us were speculating about why the game is in such bad shape -- both techincally and even artistically towards the end: http://www.gamespy.com/articles/588/588057p1.html?fromint=1 The main part (if you don't want to read all four pages): <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Absolutely true and Absolutely disgusting. A good read though. Yeah LucasArts used to be one of the best game developers in the world. They fell completely apart right before Episode 1 came out, releasing like 5 really bad SW movie-based games. They've gone thru several management changes and lost A LOT of good people in every department. It's so saddening, depressing, and unfortunate. But really how many of those game powerhouses are left? Sierra's gone (what's still there is NOT Sierra), LucasArts is a dim shadow of its original self (opinion to be finalized by Republic Commando), EA has turned into Satan's helper, Activision dreams of being EA's satanic puppy friend, Looking Glass died, the remaining piece (good part) of Ion Storm just croaked. Some have reformed into little companies like Obsidian or Troika (just died). It's a battlefield and we are the casualties really. Good game companies go away in exchange for sequel FPSs and Sports titles. Excuse me while I stop playing KOTOR2 and go load up Full Throttle to finish the saved game I'm working on there.

Yeah, they don't spend big bucks on Tech Support. They have it because they have to. Otherwise it wouldn't be such a waste of time and pain in the ass to use. I went thru the same crap with Creative Labs over my PCMCIA Audigy 2. It went nowhere for weeks basically....now they SAY they are looking into the issue, but that was like a month or more ago. These companies don't want to F-up their bottom lines with extra costs like Tech Support and actually finishing their games. There was a time when tech support was actually the developers, so it was in their best interest to get it right the first time and actually learn from their mistakes. They couldn't afford to hire "Tech Support". It's too hard to do that nowadays and remain profitable and productive. I seriously wonder just how much feedback tech support gets to the developers, assuming LEC even cares about the game anymore now that it is well past its peak selling season. The PC version will sell insignifcantly compared to the Xbox version, and its even worse since it's not Xmas anymore. It's an example of the problems of big business. And a direct result of the MASSIVE increase in development complexity and time.

I've enjoyed a gastroendoscopy myself. I got knocked out for it though With regards to KOTOR and ATI, I stand by my statements. The game engine is not particularly ATI friendly. Go back and read http://swforums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html...352372&forum=80 . I have never even played KOTOR on a NV card. I played it on my 9700 (along with a 9200 and a 9600) and I tried KOTOR 2 on my 9700 a bit, but I'm playing it almost entirely on my notebook's 9600. Historically KOTOR 1 ran better on NV hardware. KOTOR2 just seems to run terrible regardless of your hardware. It generally runs ok, but some spots are horrible. Like the fog effects. And Dantooine I believe (where I just got to). It has only crashed a few times on me, mainly in one repeatable spot on the first stage of the game at that mining station....a door would kill the game every time I tried to open it, but I managed to go around. Because of the bugs and the crap music quality, I recommend no one buy this game until it is at least patched.

It's 8-bit, 22khz, mono! Must be optimized for the original Sound Blaster. Lol. It could only be acceptable because it's being played softly as background music.

The problem is not ATI. The problem IS that KOTOR was programmed for OpenGL and Xbox. Xbox has a NVGPU in it. So, basically KOTOR was developed almost primarily for Nvidia hardware. They knew NV had 50% of the PC market and 100% of the Xbox console. So, why go out of their way for ATI? It runs on ATI. It's not perfectly optimized, but it runs. You can bet on there being some very NV-centric coding in this engine. There was in Neverwinter Nights where you'll see similar performance problems, and pixel shaded water that took FOREVER (patches) to work on ATI cards. It's similar to why Doom3 runs so well on NV hardware. Doom3 was developed again almost primarily on NV hardware. Go back and read John Carmack's .Plan files. He thought of NV as the gold standard for OpenGL drivers back during development. The way Doom3 renders breaks optimizations in ATI's hardware. Hyper Z's functionality was limited by these things, and NVidia's hardware is also more capable of Doom3's type of shadowing. The GFFX and GF6 cards are literally developed with Doom3's shadowing in mind. One of the big reasons for ATI's performance problems early on with Doom3 was that a texture lookup was being done where a math-equivalent function could have been used, and the math was FAR FAR faster than a texture lookup for ATI. Things like this are why Doom3 is faster on NV. So, basically, you people need to read a lot deeper into the problem of KOTOR. Generalizations about KOTOR being the defining factor of ATI's OpenGL driver quality are complete BS. ATI's OpenGL drivers have been becoming quite awesome since the release of R300 (9700) and this fall they dumped A LOT of resources into them specifically to try to remedy the Doom3 situation. (Go look at comparisons of Doom3 and Catalyst 4.8-onward.) ATI has this unfortunate bad rep due to their previously less-than-stellar drivers (pre-Radeon 9700 mostly, though 8500 was ok towards the end) and having developers biasing their programming for various reasons.. Honestly, you guys have probably never used really bad ATI drivers. You'd have to go back to the day of Rage Pro and Rage II to REALLY experience that. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if most of your bad driver experiences are connected with bad motherboard chipsets, primarily VIA KT266 and older. We'll see what happens with the next gen of hardware once ATI has 2 consoles out there with THEIR hardware in them. Gamecube's hardware is very different than R3x0 and R4x0, and Gamecube doesn't get the games like Xbox, so I don't think it helped ATI much in the way Xbox helped NV.

I would love to ask the composer what he thinks about what they did to his hard work. Maybe I'll email LucasArts and ask him!

LucasArts deserves to go bankrupt. I'm with everyone who says music is half of the experience of a game. It can either make or break it. Jeremy Soule made KOTOR 1 for me. He composed one of the most amazing soundtracks I've ever heard. Mark Griskey has composed what sounds like a highly original soundtrack for KOTOR 2 and we'll never hear it in any decent form. What has game development come to? This game is such a mess that I've completely lost all respect for LucasArts. The KOTOR series is really the only good game series they have and they just blew it all apart with this title. I saw it coming too. KOTOR 2 was developed in like 1-1.5 years at most. That's not enough time..... and this is what happened. Shortcuts, dropped promises.... Obsidian probably did the best they could.........but I think LEC came up with the crazy deadline. I have NEVER used software this buggy in my life. They didn't even have to develop the technology behind it yet somehow managed to mess it up more than it was! I don't see any new features, but sure do see a bunch of cutbacks. How many crash to desktops can you have in the first 2 hours of playing? 5? 10? Hey LEC, ever hear of a company called ATI? Maybe you shoulda tested your crap game on the #1 (in market share) graphics card maker out there? I can't believe this has happened. Absolutely unreal. I'm telling everyone I know not to pay for this game. Hey LEC, ever hear the rule that every unhappy customer tells 20 other potential customers to not buy your product? I learned that in school, did you? You bunch of fools.....

Well DVD resolution is 720x480 or so. 640x480 is not an unreasonable resolution at all for FMV....... The movies seem fine to me. Nothing subpar about them in relation to other FMV I've seen.. And don't compare them to what you see on a TV because you can see the flaws FAR easier on a PC monitor.

I see both the activation problem and the pulsing movement problem as well. Sometimes when you click on a door, terminal, etc it does nothing and I get stuck in place until I jitter around a bunch. The pulsing framerate occurs seemingly randomly, but does occur much more the longer the game is running.

Dunno for sure. You can try the Omega Drivers at http://www.omegadrivers.net but I'm not sure if they work with the IGPs. http://omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php I've never heard of the 9200 IGP....just 9100 IGP. If you have a real 9200 then you should be good to go. The IGPs though are pretty hacked up compared to their discrete counterparts, not to mention the seriously lessened memory bandwidth.

Gosh ---- what possible relevance does a motherboard video chip have when you aren't using it? You seriously thought I was posting that having a bypassed video chip on the MB could crash KotOR 2? Edit: OK, the chip does a couple other things too. But still... I've never heard of anyone having problems with the chip unless they were using it as the graphics controller. @Darth Ni: KotOR 1 ran quite well with the on-board video, actually. I was surprised. NWN runs too. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Eh, sorry to say this, but what Intel calls Extreme 3D 2 is really complete garbage. Even their latest stuff in i915 is really awful. You should just go out and buy a Radeon 9600XT or a Geforce 6600GT (best way to go prolly). If you want cheapo choice, a Radeon 9550 or 9600 is far better than any Geforce FX 5x00 (save the VERY top models). eBay has good deals on Radeon 9700PRO. GFFX has terrible pixel shading performance compared to anything 9550 and up from ATI. A Radeon 9600 Pro can beat a GFFX 5950 Ultra in 3dmark05.