Is there a solution for 'grey screen' lockup in SP demo?

stevedroid · 01-09-2002, 08:55 AM

I got a disc copy of the MOH:AA single player demo from Electronics Boutique and I was quite excited to play.

Unfortunately upon starting the game it just starts to a grey screen and then sits there indefinitely. There seems to be some hard drive activity going on (the little IDE activity light blinks) but it still sits there. I waited for several minutes hoping it was just taking a REALLY long time to load, but to no avail.

I searched the board and it seems that other people have experienced the problem as well. Yet, it seems there's no definite solution.

I've got a GeForce 3 card and I reinstalled the official 23.11 drivers. I tried reinstalling DirectX 8.1. I have the newest drivers installed for my soundcard (SB Audigy). I even tried the download version (which was painful on a 56k) hoping that the EB demo was a beta, alas it seems they are the same.

It's that damn EA spash screen (I saw the demo on my friends computer...that's how I know about it). Why the heck doesn't it work. I have other EA games (Alice, Undying) and the screen loads fine.

Any help/hints? Has the cause of this problem been discovered yet?

ReBel · 01-09-2002, 08:59 AM

Yes, someone posted a fix a few days ago on this forum. Sorry, I don't remember the details - delete a certain file I think...

Yachats · 01-09-2002, 09:36 AM

I think it might be something to do with the Internet connection. I removed my firewall and it worked. Using attbi cable and voodoo5.

01-10-2002, 12:20 AM

Delete the ffx86.dll (something like that) from the ../main directory, worked for me.

Also, when starting the demo, it wants to connect to internet, so disable automatic connection in windows internet options, or it will try to dial, and ends the game.

davcab · 01-10-2002, 04:58 AM

it's the audigy sound card i think if you look in the mohaa read me ... it says there are known problems with the audigy card and it is {currently} not supported... which is grear as i bought it 2 mths ago thinkinng it was the way to go.... and now i cant play the best game of the year { so far}

Arclight · 01-10-2002, 05:01 AM

Turn off/disable any virus and firewall programs--then try starting it.

Pls post your computers specs--tell us whats in the box

stevedroid · 01-10-2002, 08:58 AM

I did some more searching and read about that ffx86.dll trick and it worked!!!

Wonder what that file is for, oh well guess it can't be that important since renaming/deleting it seems to have no effect. Actaully, after booting the game once I renamed it back to normal and the game loads fine now.

Thanks for the heads up on the internet connection thing, I experienced that too once I got the game to load.

I missed that line in the readme about the Audigy. That sucks, so far the Audigy is completely backwards compatible with every old EAX game I own, so how the heck is it that they couldn't get it to work in a new game. Well, sound actually worked fine for me in the demo, I guess it just doesn't have the hardware acceleration which means missing out on reverb, echo, etc. Yeah, well as long as the sound just works I can wait for a patch to get the fancy effects.