Armada 1 Problems with Newer System
 

Hi. I got myself a new PC recently and I am sad to find that Armada 1 doesn't run so well with it. The HUD constantly flickers, some of the polygons draw very oddly, i.e. parts of the nacelles of ships being connected to the saucers with big odd polygons, or even sometimes a polygon will be connected with and sharing the verticies of planets and other ships, and lastly, sometimes the cut scenes run so slowly that it drives me crazy to try to wait for them to finish.

I have tried running the game with the compatibility wizard with all of the different settings and it is the same. I have updated the video drivers, audio drivers and DirectX just in case, even though I think I'd be better off if I could run Armada with DX 6 or 7 instead. Any ideas on what I could do about that? All other games run fine, except Star Trek: Birth of The Federation which does not run at all.

CPU: Intel Core 2 2.66 Ghz
RAM: 4GB (even though XP only seems to detect 3GB)
Windows: XP (was going to try 98 but the install disk has no drivers for me disk drives)
Video: Nvidia 8800 GTX
Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy

Also, I tried turning off anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing gamma correction, anti-aliasing transparency, the forcing of mipmaps, texture filtering - anisotropic sample optimization, and triple buffering. Didn't change a thing. The menu flicker to me almost looks like the game and the monitor refresh rate don't like each other. Also, the fog of war and other polygons share verts as well sometimes, making it impossible to see.

Armada can work fine on XP, I think the problem is most likely an overly powerful graphics card maybe? I've got a 7600GS and the game works fine for me, have you tried adjusting the ingame graphics settings? Also install the older appropiate version of directx too, just to be sure. You may find after everything that computers simply aren't as backward compatible as they should be.

I had problems with A1 when I got a new Computer with XP, the sound is all buggered up. In the end I just gave up. After all Armada 1 is a extremely old game, 7 years old in fact.

Wow! Where did you get that vid card?! That could very well be the problem, I have a 256 meg geforce and it plays fine on that, on your card though...eep:naughty:

you need to run it in compatible mode for windows 95. Other wise you'll have all sort's of glitches and problem's

to fix that you just turn off hardware accelleration, I think you can actually do that in the game's sound options. It's supposed to fix most problems with sound. My sound was dodgy then I changed me GRAPHICS card and the sound fixed itself, also I had this same graphics problem with a GeForce MX4000, but it works fine with my 7600GS.

Thanks Ryan I will give that a shot. ;)

Sounds like a driver issue to me....do a little google search and see what folks are saying are the better drivers for Nvidia 8800 card and try those.

Also, launch the DirectX Diagnostic Tool and click on the sound 1 tab and set your hardware sound acceleration level to basic acceleration.

Also, see if you can get the orginal Armada 1 install to work before installing any mods.

Well, I've tried Armada 1 on my laptop with XP, DX9.0c, 1.75 GHZ processor, 1 GB of ram and a ATI Radeon X300 and that works perfectly. So, I am thinking that it most definitely is the video card. I checked and found that some other people have had that problem as well (at least on Nvidia's forum) and so far there seems to be no drivers that solve the problem.

if you have a spare pci-expressx16 socket on your motherboard, you could always buy a second cheap graphics card (such as a RadeonX300 or a GeForce7100GS) for playing older games like armada.

Well, for now I think I'll stick with my laptop but thanks for all the suggestions guys. *wishes that Nvidia makes more compatible drivers* haha

Unbelievable. I got Vista today and I can run Armada perfectly with the 8800 GTX on that. Must be the drivers but why can't they make it work right with XP? Nice that it runs right on Vista though, since half of my other newer programs won't even open. Good thing for dual booting.