Grim & Vista Woes - Invisible Manny!

[ThunderPeel2001]

Haylp! I'm currently trying to get Grim working under Vista. I've done all the tutorials on getting it to work on XP, and I've run Grim in compatibility mode as Admin... It works! But only in software mode.

 

If I change it to hardware mode, Manny is invisible I can just about see him for a second or two if I make him run around, but that's about it.

 

Does anyone have any advice?

 

Thanks!

 

EDIT: I've found a post from someone else with the same problem, but using XP. It seems it's an issue with NVidia, not Vista.

[ThunderPeel2001]

*cough*

[Thrik]

I've not tried to run GF on Vista so I can't really provide much in the way of experience-based help, but Vista is mildly notorious at the moment for being a bit troublesome with graphics cards, and indeed even the latest Nvidia beta drivers (ie: not released to the general consumer audience yet) still don't deliver the performance of the XP equivalents.

 

What this means is that incompatibilities still exist far and wide, one of which may irreparably be Grim Fandango.

 

It's worth noting that something almost guaranteed to cause major graphical problems in Grim Fandango is having anti-aliasing turned on; to do so without issues, you need to enable it in a very specific way that's described in one of the forum stickies. Try going into the Nvidia control panel and explicitly setting anti-aliasing to 'Off' to eliminate this possibility.

 

If it doesn't help, it most likely is just a general graphics incompatibility and I can't see a band-aid fix being available. However, what you could do is to try and use an older Windows XP set of drivers on Vista. Although not widely known, this does work; the downside is that its effect on modern games can be disastrous with regards to incompatibilities/issues and performance as there're essentially no Vista optimisations, and it'll also knock out Vista's Aero.

[Grifter_Grifts]

Just partition your hard drive, or use two, and have a Windows XP/Vista dual-boot machine! I use three 500Gb SATA II hard drives for Windows Xp Pro, Xp X64, and Vista. (I guarantee you'll just end up using XP 90% of the time, lol... I do.)

 

It's perfectly acceptable to split a single 200Gb+ hard drive 50/50 for Xp/Vista. (I did it for years with Windows 95/XP Home.) I wouldn't recommend a smaller one, as Vista is a serious resource hog, and having lots of space to accommodate a hefty page file is a good idea, no matter how much RAM you have.

 

Don't be another victim of Vista... Use both, before you go insane! It's not hard to find a cheap copy of XP, if you don't still own one. (And word is, SP3 is coming!!) Vista isn't gamer friendly, even with the newer generation of games. Too bad we're being forced into adopting it, for DirectX 10. Hopefully it will improve with SP1.

 

One game's RAM requirements I saw:

 

XP- 500Mb minimum, 1Gb recommended.

Vista- 1Gb minimum, 2.5Gb recommended.

 

How the heck is this supposed to increase productivity? People spend big money to build powerful PCs equipped with Vista, just to get the performance of XP on a mediocre machine... Bah. Kinda makes you look at getting a Mac, doesn't it? LOL... Just kidding!

[Stickywulf]

I had the same problem with my nvidia graphic card. I played the game in software mode, it's very playable.

[Grifter_Grifts]

What Nvidia card are you using? What drivers? If it's a slightly older one, you could always try Omega Drivers. They may have some Vista ones. I'm not sure, as I use ATI, and Nvidia had an issue with people modifying their drivers. I'm not sure if that has changed.

 

I noticed a decent amount of improvement and compatibility when using Omega Drivers, up until Catalyst 7.5 came out, which is the last version Omega modified. We're already at 7.7, and no new Omega versions have come out since. It may be worth a shot. There are other good driver alternatives out there, too.

 

Omegadrivers.net