Noble armada demo

[Kellen]

So, in keeping with digging out old Fading Suns games (and playing EFS into the ground lately). I reinstalled the demo/beta of the never released HDI noble armada game (real shame, that, could have been awesome).

Anyway, after a lot of tweaking I managed to get it to run in XP on a laptop. But, in game, no matter what I do, the various option windows (ie: orders, game options, character sheet, etc) often display corrupted.

(As a side note, no matter what I did I could not get it to run anywhere near correctly on my main system. as best I can tell, it really does not like the GeForce 295 I've got in that one.)

Any chance anyone else has messed around with this and managed to get it working?

[tot_kto_v_bredu]

Did you run it in compatible mode?

[Kellen]

Yup, it running in compatibility, though that didn't seem to actually make any difference. The settings I had to monkey with were predominately graphics card related.
My desk top PC doesn't have an on-board graphics chip, or I'd have tried to run it on that. The game really has issues with my 295, and flat out refuses to run with the card in dual GPU mode. Not too surprising, many older and quite a few newer games don't like dual GPU no matter what driver version I use.
So, I can get noble armada to run just fine on a laptop with a GeForce mobile card in it (though, again, no on-board chip to switch too for comparison). The engine itself seems ok, but the pop up options and game menus are all corrupted. I suppose when I have the time I may try a standard/generic vga driver and see if that makes it happy.

[tot_kto_v_bredu]

Well another option would be to run virtual Win 2000 and run NA from it.

[Eightball Maniac]

I meant to try the NA demo at some point, but I never actually did. I'll grab it and see if I can get it to run properly on XP. I'll let you know how it goes!

Edit: Well, I just launched the demo. I set up a character, my ship, and went into the game. I didn't have any problems at all! I'm not going to be able to offer much help, I'm afraid. I have a GeForce 7600 card with drivers from last September, if that's of any use.

As for the demo itself, I'll have to play through it at some point. It seems quite interesting! Shame they never finished the game.

[tot_kto_v_bredu]

downloading it now.
I have vista. will see how it works.

[Kellen]

for what it's worth, I did some more digging (and various putzing with odds and ends). The released demo can *usually* work under XP/98/95 with only it's inherent bugs. However, the newer Nvidia drivers (apparently primarily the 200 series and newer) have less support for older games and processes built in. I tried some different things with the newer drivers, but the only difference came in when I rolled it back (and way back). But, if anyone else runs into the same problem, the nice thing about the demo being so old is that you can most likely run it with your newer/advanced card disabled since the graphics aren't too taxing.