All of my Direct3D games now lockup - what do I do?

[Guest]

A while ago I finished Max Payne, by saving every 20 seconds and rebooting all the time. Prior to installing Max Payne all of my other direct3d games ran fine, now they also lockup. I uninstalled Max Payne, reinstalled my gfx drivers, reinstalled directx.. but nothing helps.
Wtf does max Payne do to your system to cause this and how do I fix it???
Specs: AMD T-Bird 800mhz, 128mb 133mhz ram, windows 2000 with Service Pack 2 installed, asus geforce 2 MX with 5.33f drivers, my gigabyte motherboard is VIA chipset, but that lame supposed "fix" didn't solve the problem.
I don't want to format and reinstall just to fix this, as other people have done, whatever max payne did must be reversible.
Thanks in advance...
images/icons/confused.gif

[Guest]

This is the ASUS GF2MX.. Therefore I'm using the latest released Asus drivers for this card ie: v5.33f, I've got the latest VIA 4in1 installed, and I tried the plain nvdia drivers too..
Win2k has never given me problems with games, it started with the max payne freezing.. probably all the messing around with drivers etc. was a bad idea..
sigh

[Pepe]

Try removing your display driver from the system, but only from a software point of view, restart the system, it will reinstall the gfx card, and maybe solve your problem.

[Guest]

Well Windows 2000 ain't that great mate but l doubt that is the problem. What is that driver vesrion mate? Download 12.41 or the D4 drivers.

[hyte1]

Max Payne doesn't make any changes to your system or driver configuration so I don't think you can blame the game.

Im not sure what the problem is, but Max Payne is only a game which is installed into the Max Payne folder, and a few keys put into the registry.

If I was you, I would go for a full format, and put Windows 98 on if you play lots of games. Its far more stable!

[dgrrr]

I"m a total newbie -- but this MIGHT help as it helped me.

I installed the new Nvidia detonator drivers:
NVIDIA Display Driver for Windows 2000/XP (version 21.81, 09/08/2001)

And none of my games would run.

But I realized that's because when I restarted my PC, and loaded the new drivers, I was choosing the default, the one that WIndows 2000 was recommending.

When I instead chose the newest NVIDIA one, games were playable.

But I was still only albe to play 50% of games and still had crashi;ng.


So then I installed THIS (a diff ver images/icons/smile.gif
NVIDIA Display Driver for Windows 2000 (version 7.97, 05/20/2001) (actually I got this from the "gainward" drivers page, the drivers for the TNT section, "Faster VGA Driver (VER 7.97)"

Now all my games run right...

IF those don't work, DO try version 14.21 of the drivers.

[Mark Rejhon]

Had same problem after installing 21.81 on Win2k.
Reinstalling DirectX 8 did the job.

Go to Windows Update, override the list by displaying all installed stuff, select the DirectX 8. Let it reinstall. Reboot. You're done.

Max Payne is the only game that gave me some grief under Win2k, but now that I've finished the game...

[ 09-28-2001: Message edited by: Mark Rejhon ]

[micks]

check the help information here for the direct x bug. When dx8a was released they forgot to turn the debugging or something off for the direct sound. So go into the direct x diag bit in the control panel and disable the direct sound slider. It worked for me and i can run mp in low res without any lock ups any higher res and it crashes but on low it runs with no problems.