I've always wondered how Dell got away with such low prices. I guess this is one of the reasons.

Well, buying in huge volumes helps too.

But i will say that on older intel video chipsets the game won't work nor will it ever work on those.

Out of a perverse sense of experimentation, I tried running GalCiv2 on an ancient toshiba laptop (pentium mmx 233mhz, S3-Virge video, Win98SE/DirectX9.0c). Heh, just pounding things with a big stick ya know?

The result was that GCConfig crashed to desktop with an invalid page fault (0167:0041b8ce) and GalCiv2 displayed a black screen of nothing.

My guess is that a GPU is required, and without hardware T&L the instructions simply didn't make sense. I had thought that's what the Hardware Emulation Layer was all about; apparently that concept didn't last where it counts.

Anyway, a suggestion: Have some sort of pretest on the hardware, instead of just crashing. A pop-up that says "This computer doesn't support [insert needed item]" or some such would be a more elegant way to exit than saying "hardware requirements on the box: buyer beware".

to my knowledge GCII doesn't require hardware T & L - otherwise my little intel exteme 2 chip would be stuffed! the beta is working pretty well on my little laptop. I think the key requirement is DirectX 9 hardware compatibility - i doubt if an S3 chipset has it.

AngleWyrm, that sounds more like a driver issue to me.  If even the gcconfig program is crashing on load, it's extremely not compatible.

what version of direct x do you need, game keeps crashing to desktop after I download the beta, I have a dell inspiron 1100, will i need to update drivers also?

I think you need DirectX 9c.

latest graphics card driver

I found the latest NVIDIA display driver to be 8.1.9.5, 2005/11/11, not 2005/03/11 as reported above.

There are no more OmegaDrivers for Win98SE. Is it possible to get GC2 run on a Win98SE machine with a Radeon 9250 (the 128Bit / 128MB version)?

On the ATI side the newest version is Catalyst® Version 5.9 which I already got.

Is there any test I can perform to make sure that tha game will run?

There are no more OmegaDrivers for Win98SE. Is it possible to get GC2 run on a Win98SE machine with a Radeon 9250 (the 128Bit / 128MB version)?

On the ATI side the newest version is Catalyst® Version 5.9 which I already got.

Is there any test I can perform to make sure that the game will run?

Double post. When I hit the Edit button of #25 I end up on https://www.galciv2.com/showMsg.aspx?Msg=0 with a nearly empty screen with a blue box which contains a 0




Remark: I could edit this post but not the two above. i.e. it seem to be possible to edit the last post but not the messages before. (And no, there was no time-out. I immediately tried to edit the post after submitting.)