Can't get EECH to start

[Poop]

Whenever I try to start EECH it goes to a black screen and freezes forcing me to Ctrl+Alt+Del out. This happens no matter what patch I apply (I've tried 1.47 up to 1.9 and various mods) and it's really starting to frustrate me. I'm assuming it has to do with the fact that I'm running Windows XP X64, the rest of my specs are:

Dual Core 2 E4300
Geforce 7900 GS OC
1GB DDR2 Ram
180GB SATA HD
uhhhh that's all I got off the top of my head.

[porphy]

Hi

I'm running XP pro 64 bit with EECH all mods + 1.9 exe. No problems, so it shouldn't be your os that is the trouble. You have applied the offical patches after installing, and let it do the first time graphics conversion?
Also, you could try running it in a window. That setting is in the ini. file. Also, you could try and delete the ini. file EECH will crate a new one at start up. That solves troubles sometimes. Generally, it is a good idea to follow the install instructions by protocol here (http://www.eechcentral.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installation_guide).

Cheers Porphy

[Poop]

Still no luck. Tried deleting .ini file, and installing just the old official patches, then upgrading to 1.9, then with mods, then edited various .ini graphic settings but still nothing. Everytime I launch the game I just get a black screen that does nothing.

[porphy]

Hi

Ok. Maybe trying some other graphics driver? I also have a Nvidia card, 8800GTS, with the latest official 162.18 drivers. I can't see why the 7900 series would have a problem with EECH.
So, EECH never runs on your comp, not even after vanilla install?

cheers porphy

[Poop]

No sir. But I'll try some other drivers and see what happens.

UPDATE!!!!!
New drivers still had no effect. Still getting black screen on startup.

[porphy]

Hm, This is a copy and paste of the troubleshooting guide for EECH. You can look through it and see what might apply to you. Note that you can also try to delete the game.cfg file , not only the ini. file I wrote about above. If nothing helps, try posting at simHQ EECH forum, a lot more people active with EECH there. They might have other suggestions!


If you have some weird behaviour, go to the directory razorworks\cohokum and delete the files game.cfg which contains all the settings of the in-game user interface, and eech.ini which contains additional and settings for mods, in the cohokum directory. These files are regenerated automatically. NOTE: when you delete game.cfg the avionics in the options screen is reset to "novice" and the targeting systems do not work, you have to set it to "advanced" to make it work again.
A fresh install has been known to help in many cases (but its a pain).
Set the screen refresh to "always on" for Radeon cards.
Try in the options screen to set the Device selection to either automatic or Primary Display Driver. This may sometimes help.
Graphics settings in eech.ini: try changing the notnl setting
Some people reported a problem with NVIDIA drivers 71.xx, no cure yet.
Very old saved games may not work because certain modded settings will not be in the game. This is rare however.
Framerates: these cannot be improved much because of the old rendering system. Framerate killers are FLIR especially above cities. Also in the eech.ini settings, the options "highresMFD", " high_lod_hack" and "cbar" should be set to off or a low value. Set mfr to a high value (999). Note that the best way to test framerates is with the tool "FRAPS". Of course on your graphics card AA settings may have a negative effect (but not always, this is not the bottleneck), and the "texture preference" can be set to "high performance" instead of "high quality".
If you have windows XP and can't run apache havoc try running it in win 98 mode: right click on the executable and its a setting in properties -> compatibility.
Please try to repeat the error and report about it on the SimHQ - EECH forum. (http://www.simhq.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=30)There is a file error.log in your cohokum directory when the game crashes but it is a memory stack dump and pretty useless, no need to report that.

[Poop]

I've searched the EECH directory and there is no game.cfg, also (this only happened once) but after ctrl+alt+del out of the game I got an error message along the lines of: "D3D_error invalid objects" something like that.