My game won't run....can you guys help??

[-=Talon-Fey=-]

Hi all!

New X'er here. Nice to meet y'all! I've been a fan of the old Elite games for a while and the natural progression was on to X-BTF. Only discovered this game recently (a little late I would say!) and I'm having serious issues getting the game up and running. So where else would I turn but those in the know

I am quite sure that this has been asked a million times, and the answer is probably very easily accessible in the FAQ's but after an hour of searching I'm darned if I can find it so please forgive my noobish tendencies!

I have installed the game and updated to version 1.9. I have downloaded the 1.96 patch but double clicking it gives me an error message so I'm unsure what to do with it. Anyhoo, I load up the game and the first demo that plays loops continuously, like the first second or so of it over and over. I hit escape and the loading screen does the same, hit escape again and the main menu does exactly the same thing, and again if I actually start up a game. I have fiddled with the in game GFX settings, the sound settings, the settings on my GFX card, the load menu settings and still get the same problem. HELP!

My comp is only 2 years old, not the best of rigs but shes got 3.0 P4 Hyperthreaded, 512MB DDR400 RAM, an ATI Radeon 9550SE, a Soundblaster Audigy 2, and 2GB of free hard drive space after install so I more than meet the requirements for the game. Can any of you fine folk point me in the right direction to fix my problem?

Thanks in advance!!

Talon Fey

[Nithral]

Hi Talon Fey, Welcome.

Sorry to hear you're having problems. Reading your post I got a little confused about which version of the game you meant.

If you go to the Technical support section you'll find a wealth of help available there. I'm assuming the help you want is for X3 http://forum3.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=65 if not then for X2 go here http://forum3.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=6[url]. If you post in the technical support ... Best. :) [/url]

[Nanook]

X-BTF is an old game, released in 1999. As such, it has a hard time running on modern equipment, especially under WinXP. It was designed for Win98. My suggestion is to try running in W98 emulation mode under XP. Personally, I've never gotten it to work under XP, but I did in Win 2K, but that is with an older machine I keep around to play my older games on. While X-BTF and X-Tension are great games, you might want to consider starting with X2 or even X3. They're even better.

[Stormsong]

Moving to tech support. -=Talon-Fey=-, please post your dxdiag output. If you don't know how, check out the sticky at the top of the forum.

EDIT: Oops, I thought it was a X³ issue. Moving back to XU...

[The Wolf]

Personally, I've never gotten it to work under XP

It runs fine on mine, but only when I start it using X-196.exe. Anything else (x.exe and xdx6.exe) causes the intro and menu to play in a continuous loop. Sometimes these older games can be a bit temperamental at times.

Try downloading the 1.96 patch again to see if you get the same error message. It might have became corrupted while you were downloading it.
If you can get it to install, try all three .exe files, and if that doesn't work, try them again in compatibility mode. Other than that i'm not too sure what else you could do.

[Rapier]

My comp is only 2 years old, not the best of rigs but shes got 3.0 P4 Hyperthreaded, 512MB DDR400 RAM, an ATI Radeon 9550SE, a Soundblaster Audigy 2, and 2GB of free hard drive space after install so I more than meet the requirements for the game. Can any of you fine folk point me in the right direction to fix my problem?

The newness of your computer is probably the problem (in a sense). Coders tend to stretch the possibilities of Directx to get maximum bells and whistles in the game, sometines they even use non-standard features of the software. The problem is that, whilst later versions of DX are backwards compatable, they are only backwards compatible with standard features, so the use of the non-standard features can cause older games to fall over on new machines.

My honest suggestion would be to buy X3, or download the demo, if you want to try before you buy.

[-=Talon-Fey=-]

Ok guys thanks for the info and the warm welcome. I believe my issue is with the X196.exe. The Wolf described the exact problem I am having and since I am not using the X196.exe that must be whats causing the problem. I'm gonna give this another shot. Thanks again for all the help. I'll post again here if I can get it sorted.

Regards,

Talon Fey

[steholliday]

I would agree with Nanook. I struggled like 'you know what' to get X-BTF to run in XP, all to no avail .
Still two good things came out of it.

1. I updated all my outdated drivers.

2. Discovered X3, brilliant game .