ok, i'm running twgs on a 300 mhz p2, 128 megs ram, unsure of video card (old computer), but i think the card drivers aren't installed. it will not run bigbang or extern. the computer freezes for either, obviously ceasing all connections. what do i do?

My suggestion would be new computer. But help us a little more. What OS. Can you hit ctrl alt delete and see if anything is hanging ( not responding ). Have you tried a remove and reinstall of the server software. What are your free resources. Do you get an error message of any kind. Is it a blue screen of death. We have to have a little more to help. We will try to help you as much as possiable.

alright then, i'll keep going. windows 98 SE, latest version of twgs. have not yet had a chance to reinstall it. no bsod, it gives a busy mouse and won't do anything else. the mouse will move, but everything is frozen. ctrl-alt-del does nothing. ctrl-alt-del twice brings up the blue busy screen. a third time restarts. it just won't bring up the bigbang or extern windows. could it be a telnet problem since the default 98 telnet does not support ansi graphics? let me know. thx a bunch.

telnet should not have anything to do with it since the telnet is on the players side that is being used....I would suggest trying to get an upgraded system...The reason i say that is because with 128 meg of ram if you have any aliens then it will lag the server bad....Trust me I know from exp....Try to go at least 512...Also Windows 2000 pro seems to be the most stable....

ok, i guess i should give the whole story. i live in a high school dorm. i ran the server from my computer (1.4 athlon xp, win xp, 1 gig ram, etc.). worked fine, but no one can play when i take my computer home on a weekend (can't set it up at home b/c you can't telnet out through the server - blocked on winproxy). so, the school has this piece of crap that they designated last year as the "game server" for us to set up and use if we want. so, my attempt with this thread is to get the darn thing to work with this particular computer. so, any help would be appreciated.

hmmm sounds to me like your killing the chip, time for an upgrade.
i run my server on a amd 950 500 meg ram on a 90gig wd. still gets sluggish from time to time but i think thats just drive lag.

you should be able to upgrade to a 550mhz chip for about 10 bucks. Hell msg me i have about 10 of them in the box. Ill give you one free
kerb

i appreciate the offer, but the school is a state school, and the computer belongs to the state of alabama, so i can't do anything to it, even upgrade it. can anyone tell me how to get it to work on this particular machine without any hardware upgrades? the only problem it's having is that it will not run bigbang or extern (it might not even run teledit - haven't tried). no screen comes up when you try to run them. it just sits there. any suggestions?

Only thing I can suggest is to shut down any program that your not using to maximize memory availability, run msconfig and uncheck any programs not needed to run the TWGS. I have run TWGS on a 266 MHz laptop with 64 meg of ram and it runs fine on there, its only a test machine that I use to test edits or make up games from work, nobody plays with it but me but everything works on it. Free up as much hard drive space as possible and set the virtual memory to at least 3X your ram. Change it from desktop computer to network server in control panel, it will give you faster hard drive access. Other than that see if you can get any more ram in it, EDO is a dime a dozen now. Hope some of this helps.

hey, thanks. i'll try that.

For purposes of testing, close all other software before you start up the TWGS. Next, try to run big bang on your game. If it goes far enough, you'll get the option to start with default data, choose that. Then, try to bang it without changing anything. Let us know how far it gets. Win 98 is not the optimum OS to be running anything on, but it should work just fine so long as nothing else is causing conflicts with it. Also, you may want to delete the game you've been trying on and make a new one, in case it is something related to that specific game.

It's the video card. I know what and why... All you can do is run it (twgs) on a newer system with a better video card..

See if they will let you swap out the video card and then see if it makes a difference.

Or maybe you can remove the video driver and use a VGA driver instead and see if that makes a difference. Try turning off the Video IRQ option in BIOS, and also turning off Video Memory Caching.

I know that it is a college machine and they won't give you new parts for it, but someone is going to have to have a spare video card laying around somewhere. Even a plain vanilla VGA card would work.

quote:Originally posted by Strider_2001

I would suggest trying to get an upgraded system...The reason i say that is because with 128 meg of ram if you have any aliens then it will lag the server bad....Trust me I know from exp....Try to go at least 512...Also Windows 2000 pro seems to be the most stable....


I run a TWGS on a AMD Athlon K7 with 128 Mb of Ram, and have no problems (Although I do have lag, but it is only when I download big files). I would have to say it all depends on how the OS and the system in general is setup. The reason I say this is I have about 5 aliens races running in 3 different games (unless this isn't considered alot). But I would say that a Mhz "might" be a factor in this. I even have an FTP server and webpage server and alot of other stuff running on the computer. My resources sit right around 50% and if I am not using the internet, it seems to run flawless. I would just suggest re-installing the whole OS, and installing only the nessasary drivers and TWGS and try it.