Jedi Academy - the force is not with it

I tried it on 4 PC's here, all alledgedly good specs for this game. JA did not run on any of them. I checked the drivers and downloaded all the very latest for all machines. It still wouldn't load booting either XP or WinMill.

It took 2 weeks before I could persuade it to get passed the open gl failures on one machine and only because I am very highly motivated. The eventual fix seemed to be to flash the Asus bios!?!?! [I am not recommending bios flashing for the uninitiated. Flashing bios is best done sober and by a professional and only as a very last resort. Be sure you don't care whether that machine might never work again and the problem you are trying to fix has no other solution. But I digress.]

It took a bit more tweaking to get it to run. But you can only do that if you can actually start the game and get into the video options. This is also not cool. But performance was terrible on that machine so we gave up with it.

One of the other PC's is supposed to have an nVidea GFORCE MX which XPPro insists is a S3 prosavage KM133. This one fails with the all too familiar "GL subsystem error - have a nice day!". I haven't attempted the bios flash on that one yet ( I have a life and there are no other problems with that machine that warrant it ) but anyway I am not hopeful as I think the chip might be unsupported. All other high end games run first time on that machine.

The third one has a SiS 740, I doubt it is going to run on there either. I don't get any errors off this one - the game opens the open-GL-loading-window-thingie, starts the load sequence and then simply vanishes - no error message, nothing. I cannot find anywhere whether the SiS 740 supports Open GL from SiS or from the motherboard manufacturer.

The fourth has a humble 32 Mb RAGE 128 in it. This one was persuaded to work by adding and extra 128Mb RAM module (up to 384Mb) and swopping the 667Mhz processor for an 850 Mhz. Again we needed to be able to start the game in order to select video options that would allow the game to be played satisfactorily. Even so, there seems to be a memory leak because after a period of time the game slows down and begins to stutter. Restart fixes this.

Thought I would share this with you because I came here looking for some answers and didn't get them yet, even if it is just to tell me that it isn't going to work no matter what I do. Thanks to the guru's in advance.

Best
JoJ.
Tanzania.

Originally posted by JoJ:
I tried it on 4 PC's here, all alledgedly good specs for this game. JA did not run on any of them. I checked the drivers and downloaded all the very latest for all machines. It still wouldn't load booting either XP or WinMill.

It took 2 weeks before I could persuade it to get passed the open gl failures on one machine and only because I am very highly motivated. The eventual fix seemed to be to flash the Asus bios!?!?! [I am not recommending bios flashing for the uninitiated. Flashing bios is best done sober and by a professional and only as a very last resort. Be sure you don't care whether that machine might never work again and the problem you are trying to fix has no other solution. But I digress.]

It took a bit more tweaking to get it to run. But you can only do that if you can actually start the game and get into the video options. This is also not cool. But performance was terrible on that machine so we gave up with it.

One of the other PC's is supposed to have an nVidea GFORCE MX which XPPro insists is a S3 prosavage KM133. This one fails with the all too familiar "GL subsystem error - have a nice day!". I haven't attempted the bios flash on that one yet ( I have a life and there are no other problems with that machine that warrant it ) but anyway I am not hopeful as I think the chip might be unsupported. All other high end games run first time on that machine.

The third one has a SiS 740, I doubt it is going to run on there either. I don't get any errors off this one - the game opens the open-GL-loading-window-thingie, starts the load sequence and then simply vanishes - no error message, nothing. I cannot find anywhere whether the SiS 740 supports Open GL from SiS or from the motherboard manufacturer.

The fourth has a humble 32 Mb RAGE 128 in it. This one was persuaded to work by adding and extra 128Mb RAM module (up to 384Mb) and swopping the 667Mhz processor for an 850 Mhz. Again we needed to be able to start the game in order to select video options that would allow the game to be played satisfactorily. Even so, there seems to be a memory leak because after a period of time the game slows down and begins to stutter. Restart fixes this.

Thought I would share this with you because I came here looking for some answers and didn't get them yet, even if it is just to tell me that it isn't going to work no matter what I do. Thanks to the guru's in advance.

Best
JoJ.
Tanzania.

Now that's some old junk.

By the way, Jedi Academy has problems that no hardware can fix. Wait for a patch or better yet, return it and get a refund.

the problems are related to the video drivers. The only solution that I could propose is to download the latest official drivers for your video card! I had a similar problem with the game and I downloaded Nvidia drivers 52.16. Now it works ok

Thanks to both responders.

The hardware is not exactly state of the art, but this is Africa and we make do with what we can for as long as we can.

Returning the game is not an option since I bought it in South Africa and am currently living in Tanzania.

The reason I mention the Rage Pro is because I had previously retired that motherboard and I actually put it all back together especially to see if JA could run with that card. I just wonder what all the other kids do who don't happen to have a mother who could write her own operating system?

I still can't get that JA to run on the newer faster hardware. I cannot figure out why all the other games such as the Red Alert's and Grand Theft's, that the older kids, play work perfectly well on all these machines.

I have all the very latest video drivers from all manufacturers. It is not a problem searching for them since I have wireless internet - usually... when it works...

Anway, my young son is now playing with great enjoyment albeit on a dinosaur.

Thanks again!
JoJ.
Tanzania.