If you want to download files from this site, use this password: farcry

Sorry, missed that! Tried it and ended up with the black screen again after about a minute.

I'm going to fresh install with the early drivers and SP2, if I can get away with it. I'll start with 1.0 and move up incrementally instead of going straight to 1.4. Then, if it doesn't work, I'll know that it just isn't playing right with something in my system.

Cool, let us know how you go. It's a great game for a XP machine.

I did a fresh install of XP Home SP2. I installed the motherboard drivers, wireless keyboard/mouse drivers, Nvidia Forceware, and Doom 3. I was able to locate Forceware 178.24, which was one of the first to recognize the 9800GT, I believe. Doom 3 ran great, albeit with slightly lower rates than with the later drivers. Because 178.24 doesn't yet have the Geforce Experience thing, I didn't need to install SP3 or NET Framework 4. This is a very clean XP install for my hardware.

Well, Far Cry gave me the black screen just before the first cutscene. At this point, I figured that there was nothing else I could do if I wanted to keep the 9800GT in the system.

I decided to lower the resolution from 1600x1200 to 1152x864, and that seemed to do the trick! I played about 15 minutes of the game with no glitches or crashes. Not sure why the high res is a problem, but I can live with lower res.

Now I just have to decide if I should stick with 1.0 or move up incrementally. I'll also read up on the community patch to see if I want to have that experience without ever having played the game.

The 1.6 patch leaves everything vanilla. Unlike other mods, which change all sorts of things. It won't change anything to do the story or things like that. So I highly recommend playing it with that patch.

Far Cry has a configuration utility, make sure everything is set to very high, and water to ultra. That's as good as it gets 😀

Enable 16x AF in the Nvidia driver, the game lets you only set it to 8x.

Your recommendation is good enough for me -- 1.6 it is. It's a shame that 1600x1200 breaks the game -- it's nice to be able to max out a game's settings.

I'm enjoying returning to XP gaming. I pretty much stopped computer gaming just before this era. I even purchased Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 at retail but never installed them. Those two, plus Far Cry and maybe F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 seem to be the "classic" XP FPS games for me to start with.

Can you change the resolution when you're inside the game? Just muck around with it a few times, that resolution definitely works.

FEAR can be had from GOG, without any DRM, which is nice. Just wait for a sale 😀

These two games are really good examples of XP gaming at its finest.

I just fired this game up on my work computer:

i7 2600k
Radeon 7970 Ghz Edition
Audigy 2
XP SP3 32bit
14.4 catalyst
1.6 patch

Options:
EAX
Maxed graphical settings
-DEVMODE (because the P90 is totally OP)

It looks so mint. This must be one of the best looking games of the era. I can't believe it's from 2004. Crytek just knows pretty.

blank001 wrote:

It looks so mint. This must be one of the best looking games of the era. I can't believe it's from 2004. Crytek just knows pretty.

It is still beautiful. Crysis, also by them, can look great too, but at the time it came out, it was too demanding for most gamers' PCs, and even now some people still regard it as the game to test a new PC, though others would say The Witcher 3, or Batman: Arkham Knight (assuming you can get the latter to run well on your PC).

Yes, gorgeous game. A true highlight of PC gaming.

Crysis will soon be considered retro in about 5 years, and we'll have people building and testing period correct crysis rigs. That'll be fun.

I think what we'll see is people building tualatin rigs and then going straight to late 1155, when 1155 becomes retro (it's kind of an old soul if you ask me anyway).

Why skip Core 2? Pentium 4 even as well, for its value in hilarity in history, if not speed? Core 2 stuff is fast even today and easy to get.

And I'm not sure why people would skip ahead to Sandy Bridge, especially when there's Nehalem right there, with the bulkier Xeon-descended i7s.

I mean, c2d is still useful stuff today, but looking back when we're in the future I don't think there will be anything notable about it. I actually still use a c2d laptop as my daily driver. It's a Thinkpad T601 which is an unofficial name for a T60 with T61 motherboard. The board is penryn and still works amazingly well as a modern computer.

P4 on the other hand will surely be forgotten.

EDIT: whoa, I actually thought crysis was a 2009 game, but it's a 2007 game. The period correct crysis build threads are descending upon us quicker than I thought.

I just read the recommended specs by someone in 2007:

Pentium Quadraplegic @ 30.0 Ghz
Octa-LI of Nvidia 45 Double D's
14 Tb of DDDR10 (Doubly Double Data Rate Ten)
$900 Supreme Audacious Audigy 10,000 Premium Sound Card
DFI's Gold Digger 100% Gold Motherboard
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/98121-13-cr … -runs-quad-core

Now I'm thinking of what crysis was meant to run on. Maybe a good period correct system would be:

Q6600
NFORCE 680
8800GTX x2
Vista 64

calvin wrote:

Why skip Core 2? Pentium 4 even as well, for its value in hilarity in history, if not speed? Core 2 stuff is fast even today and easy to get.

And I'm not sure why people would skip ahead to Sandy Bridge, especially when there's Nehalem right there, with the bulkier Xeon-descended i7s.

I see a lot of reasons. One is that Crysis is a DX10 game. So that puts it straight into the post XP era. It has no issues with processors being too fast or having too many cores. So the faster, the better.

I'm also not aware of any issues with graphics cards / drivers, like some games. And finally, the game is still a challenge, even on modern mainstream cards 😀

Socket 1155, most boards allow disabling of caches and lowering the multiplier, so you can have a 1.6 GHz single core machine if you like. PCIe supports a wide rang or cards and the PCIe X-Fi Titanium.

So the reasons people built a Windows 98 machine for example, don't rally apply to a Crysis, or a Windows XP machine in general. I'm sure many will be building period correct retro machines, but just as many will be going to be build Windows XP time machines.

You know, if you had a good socket 7 like a k6-iii+, a tualatin 1400S, and a good 1155 chip, say 2500k (which I predict will be useful for gaming for another 5 years at least). 3 machines would cover at least 1990-2020. That's a decade a machine on average. The reality would be more like 1990-1997 / 1998-2002 / 2003 + respectively.

blank001 wrote:

You know, if you had a good socket 7 like a k6-iii+, a tualatin 1400S, and a good 1155 chip, say 2500k (which I predict will be useful for gaming for another 5 years at least). 3 machines would cover at least 1990-2020. That's a decade a machine on average. The reality would be more like 1990-1997 / 1998-2002 / 2003 + respectively.

Yup. I see the machines that are the most flexible, and run the most games across the longest period, the way to go. I remember when I "started" raving and promoting Super Socket 7 time machines. A lot were into building high performance 486 machines. But it's changed a little bit now. I see a lot of Super Socket 7 builds, which is awesome 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

blank001 wrote:

You know, if you had a good socket 7 like a k6-iii+, a tualatin 1400S, and a good 1155 chip, say 2500k (which I predict will be useful for gaming for another 5 years at least). 3 machines would cover at least 1990-2020. That's a decade a machine on average. The reality would be more like 1990-1997 / 1998-2002 / 2003 + respectively.

Yup. I see the machines that are the most flexible, and run the most games across the longest period, the way to go. I remember when I "started" raving and promoting Super Socket 7 time machines. A lot were into building high performance 486 machines. But it's changed a little bit now. I see a lot of Super Socket 7 builds, which is awesome 😀

Yeah I think it's a good thing you and others got the K6-III+ word out. Probably saved those who don't require 486/VLB purity a lot of time and money so they can just get straight to WC/XCOM/Quake etc...

(although I still secretly want a 486/VLB setup)

Crysis supported DX10 but did anyone actually use it?

I remember having issues with it working in DX10 mode and I don't remember people jumping for Vista at the time so I doubt it.

DosFreak wrote:

Crysis supported DX10 but did anyone actually use it?

I remember having issues with it working in DX10 mode and I don't remember people jumping for Vista at the time so I doubt it.

This thread inspired me to try Far Cry 2 (aka Crysis, not the fake Far Cry 2 that came out later) last night. I played for a bit in W8.1 and it used DX10 (know this because of -DEVMODE). I used the 32-bit executable but I'm going to try the 64-bit one today. My 2600k + 7970GE gets about 70fps on VeryHighSpec. Kind of insane for a 2007 title.

DosFreak wrote:

Crysis supported DX10 but did anyone actually use it?

I remember having issues with it working in DX10 mode and I don't remember people jumping for Vista at the time so I doubt it.

People had already troubles running it in DX9 at high settings. And probably there were even more problems if we consider it was probably one the first dx10 titles out there (and Vista itself had already a lot of novelty)
These days, I don't remember if it was 64 bit or dx10, but at least one of these things run better than the other legacy alternative on my AMD E-350 laptop

blank001 wrote:

DosFreak wrote:

Crysis supported DX10 but did anyone actually use it?

I remember having issues with it working in DX10 mode and I don't remember people jumping for Vista at the time so I doubt it.

This thread inspired me to try Far Cry 2 (aka Crysis, not the fake Far Cry 2 that came out later) last night. I played for a bit in W8.1 and it used DX10 (know this because of -DEVMODE). I used the 32-bit executable but I'm going to try the 64-bit one today. My 2600k + 7970GE gets about 70fps on VeryHighSpec. Kind of insane for a 2007 title.

It's even true that since Crysis, "placebo" super duper effects fashion become important.
I mean, that kind of effect that for example produce shadowing to be infinitesimally more soft. On the other hand it's two times more heavy for little to no really appreciable improvement.

With older games, imo this wasn't the case.