Intel Extreme 82845G

[Derkisreth]

I picked up KotoR II about a week ago, and played it wonderfully on my Radeon 9700 pro at home, finishing the dantoiine and nar shadda segments. Unfortunately, I then had to relocate to my Aunt's house, where she has a respectible computer that unfortunately lacks a video card, and an agp slot.

 

Amazingly this computer runs World of Warcraft flawlessly, albeit with fairly low settings, so I was hopeful regarding it being able to play KotoR II. When I loaded up my latest save game, aboard the Ebon Hawk, without any problem, I was thrilled. I went about my housekeeping business, upgrading weapons and chatting up my party members, and then went to nar shadda to tie up some loose ends. I exited the ramp and the game loaded up, and my characters were standing there with their idle animations.

 

This is when the trouble began.

 

I ran forward as I normally do, by holding both mouse buttons, and htings were going fine. Then I turned the comera, and after perhaps fifteen degrees of rotation the game froze. Fear and uncertainy clouded my heart. I reloaded and walked forward with the trustworthy "w" key, and managed to get all the way to the end of the platform to where the hallway turns, but then when I tried to use the mouse to turn, the game froze again. On my third trial and abandoned the mouse, and ran all the way to the next area by strafing to get around corners. I continued this tactic in the central area, and seemed to be doing fine. Hoping that the freeze was restricted to the landing pad, I attempted to turn, only to freeze again.

 

I decided to try a different planet, and flew instead to korriban. Woeful fate, the game loaded up to a black screen after exiting the ebon hawk, with sound playing, but no graphics, followed by a crash to desktop.

 

I suppose the point of this story is that the game does indeed play on this chipset, but some manner of short sighted or lazy (time saving perhaps) graphical programming has made some minor hardware texture and lighting features capable of crashing the game, with no option for software texture and lighting, which by its very nature is perfectly capable of doing everything that hardware can do, although with less performance.

 

Seeing as how many were able to run the first game on Intel Extreme chipsets, even though the requirements were similar, it is obvious that some minor graphical 'upgrades' were performed for some reason or another. I strongly doubt that these changed can be retroacted, but it is likely that software texture and lighting can be enabled, either by Obsidian or by Intel. I strongly urge everyone with an intel extreme chipset to email obsidian, lucasarts, and intel with this issue, and hopefully one of the will effect the relatively simple change.

[Derkisreth]

I have also attempted to use 3dAnalyze and SciTech GLDirect, both to no avail.

 

3dAnalyze has very limited functionality for OpenGL; all of the T&L emulation and software forcing are for DirectX.

 

GLDirect 5.0 prevents the game from running at all; it crashes before it gets to the first splash screen, whereas normally I can get all the way into the ebon hawk and run around, as mentioned above.

 

I even tried used GLDirect to force DirectX mode, and then the 3dAnalyze DirectX T&L settings, but GLDirect would still cause it to crash before any screens came up.

 

I will try an older version of GLDirect, and see if that helps at all.

 

If anyone wishes to try their luck, the two programs can be found at the sites below. I take no responsibility for anything that happens to your computer, but they are purely software interfaces and do not affect the hardware directly, so they should be perfectly safe.

 

http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/ent/gld_home.php

http://www.tommti-systems.de/go.html?http:...eien/files.html