Technical difficulties with Grim Fandango, life

[MrHoatzin]

I think my computer is dying. Some programs started acting up a week or so ago, so I shuffled the disks around, formatted D, set it as C and installed Windows again. The other day I installed Doom 3 and played a little bit of that. Then I grew bored, tried to install System Shock 2, it didn't want to be installed, so I gave up. I tried to install Uplink, but it short-circuited my on-motherboard soundcard, gave me a lot of static and restarted windows. I installed Grim Fandango, ran the patch, copied some savegame files from the game my friend was playing, ran the game, and the fucking thing started freezing in the weirdest of ways, a small loop of the music repeating ad nauseum. Or the music would die when I loaded a game and I would be forced to play without. If I don't turn on 3d acceleration, all the models are split into junk artifacts and scattered all over the rooms...

It may have shit to do with Service Pack 2. Any ideas what is going on here? I ran GF just fine on the last incarnation of this very computer.

[baconian]

It may have shit to do with Service Pack 2.

most probably. You could try a clean windows install.

it short-circuited my on-motherboard soundcard

or it could be that.

[Thrik]

Yes, the sound card getting raped would be my most obvious guess at why your GF sound is screwed. There is, however, another issue with sound that has similar symptoms -- total freeze of game in the same place every single time, repeating sound, never recovers. It's down to files on the GF cd itself somehow getting damaged, which you can test by simply attempting to copy all the .lab files from the CD to your hard-drive. If it gives you a cyclic redundancy check error, your CD's files have somehow been botched. This seems to happen to a lot of GF cds though, including mine. Perhaps the original batch used cheap CDs which die easily or something.

The only real fix is to get somebody with a functioning CD to send you the files which won't allow themselves to be copied to your HD, or download a copy of the game and import them from that.

[Moosferatu]

I have a feeling Chris is going to be laughing in your face.

[General Fuzzy McBitty]

Any time anything short circuits, it's probably pretty messed up. For more information go to your local library and rent Short Circuit.

[MrHoatzin]

Oh, yeah, and I had copied all the lab files to the disk. I don't know why the sound card would be fucking me now, and it wasn't before... I think it may be Sevice Pack 2. Anyone else with that service pack have trouble running GF? Alternatively my motherboard drivers may be out of date or however wrong.

[Thrik]

I've successfully ran it on service pack 2. ;