Thinkpads Forum

Hello everyone

It seems that Lenovo forgot to update their driver for our FX570Ms for a very lone time. Everything worked out to be fine until last Sunday. Some old friends came over and we just wanted to play Age of Empire 2 on LAN. Then the game told me something like graphic card driver did not installed correctly and DirectX can not be started. After that we tried couple of other old game like C&C Generals, Diablo 2 and Star Craft, some similar messages pop up. Newer games and 3d apps don't have that kind of problem.

My driver is up to date and I tried some moded drivers. They sure can play those old games but still have some side effects.

Can anybody help me with this one. I will send them a bucket of e-cookies.

Thanks in advance.

Try to run the game in compatibility mode... After all, it is around 10 years old...

I can play those games under Vista x64 (!) without any problems and there is really no need to set them in compatibility mode, so I assume this problems is not directly OS related.

So can I (under Vista & XP), but I remember that some people had problems and that compatibility mode helped...

Try a google search...

I did quick one -> http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=295861

Try to "play" with video driver settings...

And StarCraft is one of my favorite games of all times (and higher resolution support would be great, because 640x480 is max )...

But StarCraft 2 is near...

I just did 2 clean system re-installations. One with the driver from ThinkVantage system recovery and the other one with the latest Lenovo driver which was released on 19-01-2009 (finally).

Then I found the old driver is great with all kinds of apps and games (with a little bit performance issues) and the new driver can only support newer games and apps. So I guess this is the problem with their new driver.

I also did a search on this forum and I found there are some similar questions related to mine here. However there is still lack of a good solution. Feel pretty sad about those old games, but thank you all for helping me out.

As for StarCraft (inlc. Broodwar) and Diablo II it is also a good idea to apply the latest patches from Blizzard. In case of StarCraft this is even essential if one wants to play it under Vista (if I remember correctly).

beGi wrote:And StarCraft is one of my favorite games of all times (and higher resolution support would be great, because 640x480 is max )...

But StarCraft 2 is near...

I agree it´s a pity that StarCraft is only available in the very low range of resolutions. And this is also the case with Diablo II. But as StarCraft II is approaching, so it is Diablo III I guess both games will encourage people to buy newer ThinkPads

Off topic: I never got why so many people play on BigGameHunter. I found it so unpro and noob-like

@beGi: I believe I´ll have all the info you asked me for regarding brain&energy by the end of this week, so keep an eye on your inbox

What you have to do is to create a custom resolution for 640x480x8 to play starcraft. I'm doing this from memory, but
go into the NVidia control panel.
click on custom resolution
Create a new one
input 640 and 480 and replace the bit depth with 8.
Click on test and ok
Then you want to reset the resolution back to where you were because who wants to live in 640x480 normally.
After you do all that you can run starcraft.
You could complain to nvidia too .