Thinkpads Forum

I know the Intel GMA 945 is no media powerhouse, but out of curiosity I went and installed a few of my favorite older games. I'll post my results.

3D
Call of Duty 1: Runs great, no problems.
Morrowind: Have to tone down view distance a tad, otherwise perfect.

2D
Diablo 2: "runs" great, but is very...... red?
Age of Empires 2: Same as D2, reddish pixels everywhere...

I'll try and take a picture of this, but when I "PrtSc" the image comes out crazy for some reason.

As you can see though, the 3D games seem to running better than 2D. The GMA 945 clearly has the power to run these games, but for some reason is choking on the 2D games. The 3D games experience no color issues whatsoever, only the 2D ones.

Anybody have any ideas? There's a Teutonic city waiting to be taken down....

PS I just updated the display drivers from Lenovo's site, so no quick fix there.

A while back I discovered the best possible program for people like yourself and I who play "old" games all the time. Microsoft Virtual PC. It allows you to setup a machine within a machine, and install any OS you like. I had issues running some old games. Installed two machines. One Win 98 and one DOS 6.22/Win 3.11. Now I have no trouble running almost any game.

MS Virtual PC 2007

Maybe has something to do with DirectX? AoE2 uses DirectDraw to draw the stuff on screen, methinks.

See if the diagnostic tool 'dxdiag' shows any errors (sometimes running it will automatically fix things), then try updating directx.

Norriscell- I downloaded Microsoft Virtual PC and it looks very promising (I have even older games I would like to play) only problem is I have long since lost my copies of Windoes 95 and 98. Ironically I still have my copy of Windows Me.... I could try it with DOS, but I usually just use DOSbox for that. This will most likely become an ongoing project, but thank you for introducing me.

force- Does AoE2 use DirectDraw? I had set Diablo 2 to run in that mode as well, so this may be a connection.

dxdiag showed no errors, I ran through the tests were up there. I also downloaded what I believe to be the latest version of Directx 9.0c, to no avail. I'll try Diablo 2 in "3D" mode and see if it runs differently.

EDIT: Diablo 2 runs perfectly fine in "Direct3D" mode, so I guess DirectDraw is this issue. (who would've thought 2D not 3D would be the problem) Anyone have any ideas on how to get DirectDraw functioning properly? I really only need it for AoE2, but well, IT IS AoE2.