Retail Radeon 8500 problem....

[rocketbubba]

Here's the story: In case this info might help, my rig is an Iwill KK266, Tbird 1.4 (266), 256mb Crucial Ram (pc133, cl2), Philips Seismic Edge 5.1 soundcard, and a ATI Radeon 8500 (retail built by ATI w/ 64mb). I'm running Win98.

I installed the 8500 in my machine about 2 weeks ago to upgrade from ATI Radeon 7200 (retail built by ATI w/32mb). I upgraded for increased performance and the TV-out. When I installed the 8500, I used the Catalyst 2.1 drivers. Since I installed the 8500, a few games won't run (they ran fine w/ the 7200 btw). The games are the basic Windows games (Solitaire, Free Cell and etc - occasional "missing segment" error message) and also a kids game called Lego Island 2 (made by Electronic Arts) where I get an "invalid page fault" error.

As I said, when I was running the 7200, all was fine. Since I installed the 8500, all of my other games/progs are working normally and the TV-out is excellent, so overall I'm happy with this video card.

I called the tech support folks at Electronic Arts (they treated me very well I might add) and they suggested changing soundcard acceleration settings - tried it - no good. After going through everything, they told me that this game has issues with the Radeon VE chipset and that that may be the problem with the Radeon 8500. Any thoughts about the error messages or the chipset issue? Thanks!

 

[Furor]

Try reinstalling the game? I don't know anything about these games but it's best to completely clean out all the video drivers from registry and add/remove program files before you install another card(if you didn't)

 

[rocketbubba]

Thanks for the post. Yes, I tried uninstalling the games and reinstalling them - no good. Before installing the 8500, I removed the 7200 drivers using a routine a friend gave me. The routine included removing all ati*.* files from the c: drive and opening regedit and removing the hkey... files - it took a little while to find all the files - I was amazed at how many there were! Anyway, sorry to say that didn't help. So finally I did a clean OS install and that didn't help either. I have a feeling it's something simple, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

By the way, I have discovered something interesting: the problems with the basic windows games go away if I'm on-line! I discovered this because I tried to look for the error message while I was on-line and everything worked fine. As soon as I logged off, the games stopped working again - too strange!