Windows 10 Crashes

[Grampy]

I apologize if this post is redundant, but I did not find anything similar to my problem in existing posts.

I have the original CD game (2 disks) and installed it successfully on my Windows 10 64-bit PC. I wanted to get the latest patches and found this Hawk and Badger website which has a lot of great info. I downloaded patches 1.03, 1.04, and then 1.05......but when I launch the game, it shows the opening video but then stops halfway through it and returns me to my desktop. When I launch it a second time, it takes me straight to the main menu, showing that it is now on Version 1.05, and then again returns me to my desktop.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I may have to uninstall and reinstall to revert back to running the original version 1.0 from CD disk 2.

Thanks,

Grampy

[Gumboots]

What version are the discs? IIRC the CtC expansion is built on 1.04 anyway, and 1.05 has been around since the 2004 discs were issued. Unless you have discs that were issued back in 2003, you won't need the patches at all. It's possible that trying to install them borked something.

I'd try reinstalling from scratch, without any patches, and see what game version displays. If you still get crashes, it could well be a problem with the "Hardware T&L" setting. There's a so-called "Vista fix" which was developed to get around that, so you can try that for a quick test:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/3iddceca0 ... ta_Fix.zip

That's a simple one file, drop-in replacement (Data/Configuration/engine.cfg). If that works, then we can get into better fixes for the same problem.

[Grampy]

Thank you Gumboots for your help!

I checked my disks/packaging, and I definitely have the original 2003 version of the game. I downloaded the Vista patch, placed the engine.cfg file in the Data/Configuration directory and now everything is working - I have all the patches, up to 1.06....!

Thanks again....

Grampy

[Gumboots]

Ok cool. Working is a good start.

The Vista fix gets the game running, but does it by disabling "Hardware transform and lighting", which is a fancy way of saying it turns your graphics to crap. Water reflections won't work, the overall lighting and shading is pretty dull, and the frame rate tends to be less stable.

You may also run into the "blurry graphics bug", another gremlin that infests RT3 installations on modern boxes. That one is caused by modern graphics cards having too much RAM for RT3 to cope with. Past a certain point the game will not recognise that a video card with heaps of RAM has any at all, because it simply can't deal with the numbers in question. As a result it will force a fallback to lower level textures on all game assets, so a locomotive that would normally be using its A skin at close range will drop back to the D skin.

The game looks better and runs more smoothly if hardware T&L can be enabled, and obviously you want the asset skins on their best behaviour too. Fortunately there's a way of allowing this: the dgVoodoo add-on.

You can get it here: http://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2.html
You want the latest stable version: dgVoodoo v2.55.4.1
You shouldn't need any of the D3D compilers. Windows 10 comes with D3DCompiler_47.dll as standard.

Installation instructions can be found in this post: viewtopic.php?p=42169#p42169

dgVoodoo is very good, but one minor downside is that it stops you being able to take screenshots in full screen mode. To take a screenshot you have to jump into windowed mode. I find this isn't a problem (F9 hotkey) but there are more add-ons to fix that if you really want them.

This gives you the basics that should get the game looking good while still running smoothly.
If you want to know more trickery, keep reading. If you don't, you can stop here.

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One detail not mentioned in the installation post is that dgVoodoo allows the option of forcing screen resolution to match your monitor. In my case that's 1920x1200. I did try using this but it introduced a couple of glitches (dodgy cursor and reduced frame rate). I found that, at least with my box, using the game's 1600x1024 setting was a better compromise. That's almost exactly the same ratio as my monitor, even though the resolution is lower.

If you can't find a game setting that matches the ratio of your monitor there's another add-on you can try: uniws. That will allow a custom game resolution without introducing glitches during play, although the higher resolution will involve some degree of performance penalty. Personally I don't use it because whenever you jump into windowed mode (which I tend to do quite a lot) uniws will forget your custom res and revert to 640x480. Needless to say this looks terrible, and you have to go and sort it out again. That's not terribly difficult, but it is a nuisance.

Another thing you can do, if you don't want to mess around with uniws, is to manually edit engine.cfg to make the game think your real resolution is the game's 640x480 setting. You can then save a copy of the edited file, for pasting into Data/Configuration if you screw your custom res by going into windowed mode. This might sound scary if you have never done any hex editing, but it's a simple process and I'm fine with doing it for you. Note that it will still suffer from the same problem, and you'll need to reset the custom resolution by pasting the saved file in every time you go from windowed mode back to full screen (which will involve a game restart to allow the changed file to work).