WARNING: USE THIS TRICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!
If you are the least bit wary about fooling with your system settings, look towards the bottom of this post for a section called “A POSSIBLY SAFER THING TO TRY FIRST” and do that instead. I make no guarantees about any of this, but I’m just happy to be playing Quake-based games again. This worked for me, but I’ve only had it going for about 2 hours now. - Tritone
Like others on this forum, I’ve got an nVidia GeForce-based card and have been having trouble for months getting Quake-based games to run. Sometimes they’ll hang on a blackscreen. Or like SOF II, they just complain they “could not load OpenGL subsystem” and exit.
I have a brand new nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4400 and Win98SE. It was too unbelievable that a brand new video card should have so much trouble running any new game. So I found this forum and stumbled across the suggestion to edit (of all things) C:\WINDOWS\WIN.INI to comment out DVA=0 by putting a ; in front of it, so it looks like this:
;DVA=0
Well, this ALMOST worked. SOF II would now come up, and change resolutions, and change the cursor to an I-beam, and then… hang. DOH. No luck. But so close! But that gave me an idea…
While looking around in WIN.INI, I was amazed at how much OLD CRAP was left in there. I’m quite sure this machine was originally Win95, then Win98, then Win98SE, and I actually found references to EIGHT previously-installed video cards in my Registry and WIN.INI! Who knows what some of those settings were doing to my computer.
So, what did I do? I renamed WIN.INI to WIN_BAK.INI, and rebooted the computer. I like to live dangerously. I figure… if the machine crashed, I could either rename it back, or I’d have to reinstall Win98SE all over again… a step I figured was inevitible anyway.
Guess what? Nothing happened! No crashes, no blue screens, not even a complaint! It just booted up like nothing was unusual. I took a look in the C:\WINDOWS folder, and sure enough, Windows had rebuilt me a new WIN.INI file, but it only had about 10 lines in it! Is there any software out there that really uses WIN.INI much anymore… I read somewhere (perhaps incorrectly, and if so I’m sure we’ll read about it 
that it’s mostly for legacy programs that never heard of the Registry, or need to interact with other old programs that use WIN.INI. Everything uses the Registry these days. HOWEVER, Windows DOES PROCESS the WIN.INI file settings, and (obviously) they can NEGATIVELY IMPACT your system if some crappy old video card from 5 years ago put a setting in there that says “this computer has no video accelerator”. (I’m just guessing that’s what DVA=0 might have meant).
But the bottom line is… I CAN PLAY SOF II! It came up with nary a hitch, and I played the entire Tutorial without stopping. Woo hoo!
By the way, here’s another tip I found that SOMETIMES worked for me in the past (especially with MOH and JK). Sometimes if the wind was blowing just right, I COULD get those game to run. I found that if I could switch the game to WINDOWED MODE [by pressing Alt-Enter on the keyboard]… so that it plays inside a windowframe ON your desktop, without taking over the fullscreen, I could play the entire game with no problem at all! I played both MOH and JK in windowed-mode like that. I wasn’t HAPPY about it, but hey. I suspect there may be a Quake config setting (for those who know such things… I don’t) you could put in your Quake-based games that would FORCE it to come up windowed, and maybe YOU can run them this way if you can’t get any of the aforementioned solutions to work. Hopefully someone will post that solution here (if it exists).
A POSSIBLY SAFER THING TO TRY FIRST
If I get really ambitious, I may try to reinsert some of my old WIN.INI settings back into the new (short) WIN.INI to see at what point SOF II fails again. For the record, I found DVA=0 in a section called:
[DrawDib]
DVA=0
othersettings=x
othersettings=y
othersettings=z
etc.
There were about 10 other lines in this same section… maybe if I had just commented them ALL (by putting ; in front of each one), I wouldn’t need to remove WIN.INI completely. You MIGHT want to try this first.
Anyway, if I have any trouble with my system, I’ll be sure to post it here. If you don’t hear from me, assume I’m playing SOF II!!
Tritone
should read…