Either steam or Vista 64-bit is pissing me off

[Compnewbie01]

I installed Vista 64-bit about a year ago and have recently noticed issues with my older steam games. I cannot seem to play ANY Quake engine game such as HL1, TFC, OPFor, etc. I really want to play through these again as I haven't in several years. Does anyone know if this is a known/permanent issue?

 

[Zenoth]

Those games you mention are all OpenGL, so your issues may be related to your OpenGL settings in your drivers. Maybe not, I'm not exactly sure about this. First of all, try the following: Find the Half-Life's executable and right-click on it and access its properties, and make it run with Administrator Privileges, and if that doesn't work, leave that enabled and just add a compatibility mode with Windows XP SP2. That may help run the Half-Life-based games (the ones using H-L's engine, such as TFC and OPF).

Same thing goes for Quake, just locate the main executable in the installation directory and try the same thing. If all of that doesn't work then maybe it's related to your OGL settings, but if you're using an NVIDIA graphics card you'll need to use a third party program like RivaTuner to adjust OGL settings since the default NVIDIA's control panel only allows adjustments for Direct3D settings.

And then there's the usual things to do like making sure that you're using the latest audio and video drivers, the latest motherboard BIOS and the latest chipset drivers.

 

[The Keeper]

I've played HL1 on Vista SP1 x64 right from Steam without any problems, but that was months ago.

 

[Compnewbie01]

Can't seem to do anything to get it to work. Both compatibility tweaks and RivaTuner do nothing. This is so disappointing. The .exe crashes before any game window is open. It just says that the half life launcher has stopped working.

 

[The Keeper]

If you can find error or crash log of those games, they may reveal why the game crashed. Such logs are often located in the game installation folder, at least in older games.

Failing that, uninstalling, rebooting and reinstalling latest video drivers may help. Or perhaps you should try old drivers, like half a year older ones?

 

[Lorthreth]

Support Wiki
I had problems like that too, and the last settings there helped. Try running GoldSrc in DirectX mode and see if that helps

 

[YBS1]

I had this problem when running my steam games under vista 64 originally. This is what ended up working for me. Open steam, go the my games tab, right click on the particular game, select properties, local files tab, and then click on verify integrity of game cache.