thecrankyhermit wrote:

Geforce 6800nu

is your problem. Actually the drivers are, and other games exhibit this behavior on the entire geforce line iirc (such as 7th Legion)
your best bets are:

- Install/use a non-Geforce card or use onboard non-Geforce video if available. If you love your Geforce to bits, then don't do this. 🙁
- Install a full virtual machine (Qemu, VMWare, VirtualPC, VirtualBox), and install Windows into that, and then this game
- Install the DOS version of the game from the CD in DOSBox (easiest method). Your CPU can handle this game fine in that. No idea if it supports the expansions though, since I personally never had those 🙁
- Use Linux + Wine (not necessarily install it, Live CDs with Wine could work too) though I have no idea how GTAWIN is supported in Wine.

Typo. I'm actually using a 9600GT. My previous system with a 6800nu ran it just fine. And I'm using the same driver version now as I was then.

What driver version?

178.13, NVIDIA GPU Forceware drivers, for Windows XP 32-bit.

Go back to the 94.24 drivers or older and the problem is gone.

That's just not something I'm willing to do. As a rule of thumb, it's a new system, and I'll be playing TF2 on it much more than I'll be playing GTA1, so any solution that impairs its ability to play TF2 isn't a good one.

These older drivers won't break any game unless the game actually checks for the drivers version. I had a 6800 and now a 7900GT. Both wouldn't just work properly with any driver newer than 94.24.

I'm not regressing my system for the sake of one game that I don't play on a regular basis. Newer drivers have advantages over older ones, which is why GPU manufacturers go to the trouble of making them.

I have not seen any advantage on new drivers. They only make my system go slower and crash my favourite games. 94.24 are the last rock solid I have. Newer ones simply won't work right, so I always end up returning to older.

I absolutely needed the most up to date drivers (at the time) for my 7950GT. Otherwise Crysis was a garbeled mess. Now it runs very nicely.

thecrankyhermit wrote:

Typo. I'm actually using a 9600GT. My previous system with a 6800nu ran it just fine. And I'm using the same driver version now as I was then.

Sorry, I missed that. The 94.24 drivers won't work with any Geforce 8000 and up. The neatest solution I could come with was to use VDMSound and dgvoodoo (to use the 3dfx version for better graphics).

7th Legion has an unrelated problem, Google found me this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAF5sSsxnZk

That didn't work too well for GTA. Attempting to run it now gives this:

Quite simply retro WINDOWS gamers (as opposed to DOS games which have DOSBox as an easy solution) need to invest in one of the emulation titles mentioned above. I use Virtual PC with an old Win98 OS disk I have to give me a Win98 system within my XP system. This allows me to play games like Star Trek Generations and Dune 2000 (to quote just 2 titles!). I also ran 7th Legion in my Virtual PC with no problem, but then found a patch that let the game play in XP. Virtual PC allows you to use your CD/DVD Drive and allows access to shared folders. This means patches can easily be applied by copying to the shared folder then starting Virtual PC and accessing that same folder to bring in the patch/mod whatever. A Win98 OS Disk can be got for very low prices on ebay etc, and is an excellent investment in my book, as I have nearly as many early win95/win98 games as I do DOS games, and it's these early Windows games (especially the ones that weren't big hits so don't get much support today) that Virtual PC can generally run wonderfully!All I hope is that Virtual PC keeps getting upgraded to a slightly more powerful PC, as some laterWin98 won't run on it as it is not powerful enough, and yt they won't work in my XP system because it's too powerful!

As a 20 year plus PC gamer, I can see the writing on the wall for AAA PC titles. The choice will become drastically small, and any genre outside of action games (FPS's/TPS's, etc) likely to practically disappear. Those that do arrive are likely to be further dumbed down as each generation arrive with more and more publishers looking at the console/casual market alone. You only have to look at the Morrowind/Oblivion debate, or the 'streamlining' of games like Dawn of War 2 versus Dawn of War, or Empires Total War versus Rome or Medieval II TW, or even GTA IV versus GTA San Andreas!

I have been quietly building up my retro game collection via ebay, etc, and now have over 300 PC games from 1990 onwards, and now own pretty much every game I originally bought and loved but lost over time fo various reasons. Games like the Thief series, System Shock 1 and 2, Ultima Underground 1 and 2, Wasteland/Fallout 1/Fallout 2, Terra Nova: Task Force Centauri and Darklands!

I would recommwend every reto PC gamer to invest in a Win98 OS disk and downloading Virtual PC or one of the others. It will be an excellent long-term investment! 😀

GTA 1 (not London 1969) was rebuilt to run on modern systems, but still has the same problem. I've been bugging nvidia to fix this, but apparently nothing has been done so far.

Doesn't GTA1 support 3DFX? I know GTA2 does, I have it working 100% in Vista x64 here natively.

If it does support 3DFX, check out the dgVoodoo Wrapper (which works 100% for GTA2 and looks and runs a LOT better than Direct3D mode) 😉

EDIT: Older drivers are only better SOMETIMES for older videocards in my experience. Forceware 98.xx doesnt even support the 9600GT im 99.9% sure, you'd have to hack the driver (there's about 2 years difference between driver and card), and even then it's just not worth it - DirectX9 games will choke on such a historic version (as he said - TF2 will be no more).

Yes, I only noticed he had a 9600GT afterwards.
GTA1 supports 3dfx, but only the DOS version.

Oh right fair enough (9600GT factor).

3DFX... only for DOS.... wow that's interesting. I was only a kid when my dad for his first Voodoo accelerator, but Windows 95 was well and truly mature by then - didn't know there were that many DOS games for 3DFX. Then again I do remember references to the OVL's all the time (OVL is a DOS/16-bit driver right?)

Yes, and quite a number of DOS titles support 3dfx (Blood, Carmageddon 1, GTA1 and London, Nascar Racing 2, Screamer 2, Shadow Warrior and Tomb Raider 1 that I remember). Except for GTA 1 and London, all of them need a patch for 3dfx support. GTA 1 works quite well with a glide wrapper, but needs to run with Generic Sound Blaster on setup and I still couldn't get Glide working under DOSBox, even with CVS versions.