"I get as far as a window telling me which processes are active"

you mean taskmanager why would that pop up ?

ps: that program you install DVDExpress is that just dvd playing software ?
does it play dvd's ok ?

Not taskmanager, no. Probably because Overseer is a Win95 game, predating the way XP easily gives control of a lot of itself to the user, Overseer seems to run some sort of program, defined by a SENTRY.INI file, which lets me know of a few processes that I might want to turn off in order to run the game. Usually it's firefox and something else. Since stopping those processes didn't help me with the problem, I just clicked the "Do not display this window again" button. This is the only part of the game that I can run, which is akin to saying, I can't run the game at all.

DVDxpress pops up everywhere as software I *need* to install to play Overseer, so I did. As far as I can tell, it's pretty old software that allows you to play DVDs, nothing more. On a whim, I tried to copy all DLL files from DVDExpress to my Overseer folder, but predictably, nothing changed. It does read video DVDs well.

Ok - I have changed my graphics card recently, it didn't use to be the one I listed here (and I don't remember which one it was anyway). I'm now noticing that in DosBox I'm starting to have to change render modes. OpenGL and overlay mode, for instance, now crash Dosbox with the same uninformative error.

Too much of a coincidence, so I'm guessing the problems are related, and therefore can be traced to my graphic card.

I tried installing the newer drivers - 9.12, whereas mine are 9.08. But I couldn't get the new installation to "stick" - the installation ran, but nothing was ever installed. In the end I simply went back to the version that came in the CD shipped with the card.

I really don't want to mess with the drivers anymore. Question - is there any way, however hackish, to make a game use some other form of rendering, the way I can change between them in Dosbox?

Also, I did read that my problem with updating the drivers is relatively common to my type of graphic card, and that unnofficial solutions exist, but I'm always rather wary of those...

Incidently, it's particularly annoying that this new graphics card can play Tomb Raider Anniversary, Tomb Raider Legend and Torin's Passage (way new games, and way old games); I even found an XP patch for Phantasmagoria 2, which I thought was the find of the century; but I can't play Overseer. 😜 My older card at least ran these older games without all these issues.

9.12? Ati Catalyst right? Try ddraw as output option.

9.08, since trying to install 9.12 didn't "stick", as I described. But I'm not sure I follow you. I can, and do, change the output in Dosbox, but my problem now is with this Win program, in which I can't easily change the output (and is why I was asking for some other way, possibly hackish).

Or do you mean I can configure Catalyst so as to output as ddraw at all times? That would be extremely helpful, and would probably solve my problems. But how do I do that? I find nothing within Catalyst itself that might help me do that. Maybe it's somewhere else in my system? Do tell, it looks like the best solution.

No, I mean setting output=ddraw in dosbox.conf file (DOSBox configuration).

Well whatever the output mode, DOSBox shouldn't crash when starting. The problem with driver installation sounds peculiar, too.

redruM, the error message you're seeing is indeed very uninformative. I think it's just a notice about the game crashing, but who knows why it's crashing. The fact that you're seeing DOSBox crashes is a definitive pointer, though. If i were you i'd just use my old graphics card for testing. If the game works, the source of the error is clear.

Btw, i don't know much about that ATI card, but it seems to be way oversized for your system. I've used a Radeon X1650 Pro on my old P4 system, and the CPU was never able to really tax the graphics card, not even in the most demanding games. You Celeron is much, much, much slower than a "real" P4. Maybe you can give back your new Radeon and/or trade it for a different card - possibly even a working one (; .

There isn't a "magical switch" to make the graphics card use only specific "modes". It just doesn't work that way. The app/game will be using a certain API (Direct3D, DirectDraw, OpenGL, etc.) which will translate the request and give it to the graphics card driver, which in turn will draw pretty pixels. If the game/app insist on using OpenGL, for example, you're pretty much stuck with OpenGL.

I see. Well, it *is* a pretty old system, indeed. So much so that at this point changing the processor would mean changing the motherboard and changing to yet another sort of graphic card - I think this is called "onboard", but really, I'm relatively clueless. Still, with this card I'm able to play Dreamfall, which with my previous card ran slowly enough to be unplayable (although, predictably, newer stuff like Tomb Raider Underworld and Broken Sword 4 are unplayably slow).

Anyway. I guess that means Overseer is out of bound with my current hardware. I shall have to mull it over. In the meantime, thank you for your help. It's great to always have one sure place to come to when I need help running old games. 😀