2 posts tagged “troubleshooting”
Turns out all my troubleshooting in the previous post was just a lucky coincidence. In the past 6 days attempting to get The Orange Box to work I couldn't reliable find a method to get the game to run. This involved updating drivers, disabling on-board sound, and running DirectX tests. No matter what I did I couldn't reliable get anything to run without chopping sound or gaming in slow motion.
After some digging on the Steam support site I discovered the myriad of launch options you can set when you start games. When deciding which option to enable I noticed that in the video options for Portal, my Hardware DirectX level was only detected as being DirectX 8. That seemed a little low for my Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, so I launched Portal using the launch option "-dxlevel 90" and everything was right as rain. Inspecting the video options in Portal showed that my Hardware DirectX level was DirectX 9. Imagine that.
If you're having a similar problem running The Orange Box in Windows XP give that a try. Good luck.
Like most people I couldn't resist picking up The Orange Box. I managed to hold out until Saturday to pick it up through Steam. 16 GB of downloads later and I had it installed (didn't even notice because I was at the bar). This was my first time using steam and I was impressed. The 2D interface for the application reminded me of my favourite app Ableton Live so that didn't hurt.
Having only heard good things about Portal (included in The Orange Box) all week I was excited to fire it up and start hopping through some portals of my own. Penny-Arcade even created an amusing comic for it. Launching Portal didn't go exactly as I imagined it would though. The intro screen chopped and stuttered (did I make a mistake going with onboard sound for my latest rig?) and I heard a lot of random sounds through my headphones. Maybe it was just a bug in the opening screens. Start a new game. Wake up from my pod. Look at clock on the wall counting down from 60 seconds. Why is the clock going at 1/3 the speed. Does portal use longer seconds? Confidence dropping.
Thinking that Portal's the new kid in town and not quite debugged, I fired up Half Life 2 (also in The Orange Box) and was relieved to find that the sound wasn't chopping like in Portal. Let's start a new game. Why am I walking soooo slowly? All the NPCs are talking in real time but they're moving slowly too. Not good.
After some Google-Fu, I deduced that a little service running on my machine called AINap.exe (a feature of some ASUS motherboards) was the problem. I launched the Windows Task Manageer and ended that process. Fired up Portal, no problems. Yay!
Since I never used the AI Nap functionality of my motherboard (I prefer my computers either on/off/sleeping, not some in between state) I fired up AutoRuns and removed AI Nap from the Logon tab. That will keep AI Nap from slowing down my Portal playing.
How is Portal you might ask? Well I was a little busy getting my Netherwing faction up yesterday in Warcraft, but I did watch Alexis play for an hour and it looks awesome.
