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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 16th Dec 2013 at 11:12 PM

This user has the following games installed:

Sims 2, University, Nightlife, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage, Free Time, Apartment Life
Default Interpreting the specs
All right, so - my new computer has arrived and I've been loading and testing and transferring and so on. All my tests have been good, until I installed AL and had Marissa Cleveland go visit a neighbor.

Under my old setup (with a not-quite adequate card), I was able to see a visited apartment clearly and in living color. Now I can only see silhouettes, harking back to my early experimental days when I was busy burning out the chipset on a laptop.

My first thought was that they hadn't given us the correct videocard. The computer was advertised with an AMD Radeon HD-5450, which according to the handy chart isn't good enough for all EPs, so I asked if they could upgrade to a 5550 or 70, which should be good for all EPs and SPs, and they agreed to do it for an additional payment. So I quit, got out, and looked in the device manager, which says this is an AMD Radeon HD-5500, which is a) not what we asked for and b) not on the chart.

So - is this the likely source of the problem? And if not, where else should I look for it?

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
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Née whiterider
retired moderator
#2 Old 16th Dec 2013 at 11:26 PM
I suspect it's giving you the series number rather than the model number. Have you tried updating your graphics drivers?

What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact.
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#3 Old 17th Dec 2013 at 12:28 AM
No internet in that room. If I put the driver disc in, will there be other drivers on it I can try out? (Having visual problems and not fit to experiment today, or I'd just go find out.)

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Née whiterider
retired moderator
#4 Old 17th Dec 2013 at 9:20 PM
Don't use the ones on the disk - they're out of date. Download the drivers onto another computer, then copy them over using a USB stick or somesuch.

What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact.
Mad Poster
#5 Old 17th Dec 2013 at 10:45 PM
You may also need to add your card to the SGR to get full effect out of it. http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/showthread.php?tid=3666

All my Beginning Hoods here at MTS. http://www.modthesims.info/member.php?u=7749491
All my Beginning Hoods as Shopping Districts plus Old Town. http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=523417
MooVille, a tribute to Mootilda and her fabulous lots http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=534158
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#6 Old 17th Dec 2013 at 11:04 PM
Actually they don't seem to have been installed properly. I popped the disk in and hit "autorun," expecting to get a pop-up saying something like: "This is already installed! Here, have a clue about what to do next." Instead it ran. So I tried starting the game and took Mrs. Cleveland to visit a neighbor again, and it all looked great. So I think it's a good thing I had the problem - otherwise I could have been running the machine with a not-quite-functioning driver indefinitely and heaven knows how that would have turned out. If I get any other weird graphical problems, however, I'll do as you suggest.

So I put all my stuff in, or tried to (see below), and bypassed the launcher, and tried to go to regedit and change the language from UK English to US English (since I have a UK M&G), and I can't find a place to change the Language Value, as described in the Help FAQ. I'm running Windows 7 now, and instead of Language and Language Value, it has Language and Locale (and a bunch of other things that don't look relevant). So I tried changing Language and Locale to US from UK, but there was no place to change the hex value, only the data name, which I duly did in a spirit of experimentation. So I loaded Drama Acres, and my CAS sims are all randomly named, which is a problem I had when I first installed M&G which is fixed by changing the language. Where in Windows 7 do I look for this value?

Also - this isn't strictly speaking a game problem in the usual sense - Although I was able to transfer my Widespot and Strangetown folders on the thumb drive without a problem, the Drama Acres Storytelling folder is giving me fits. The copy function will copy a portion of it (it is, of course, huge) and then suddenly throw an error: "Cannot copy (filename): the directory of file cannot be created." And it just stops. From that point, it doesn't matter what individual file I try to copy, or what type it is; but it has copied a large number of files of each type before it reaches that point.

Granted, the damn thing is huge; but the entire subfolder with every single .jpg, xml, and bak file is slightly under a gig and a half, and the thumb drive holds more than 7 gigs, so it's not a matter of not having room. I'm flummoxed.

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Mad Poster
#7 Old 18th Dec 2013 at 12:35 AM
If you have another computer try and copy it over to it and see if that works.

All my Beginning Hoods here at MTS. http://www.modthesims.info/member.php?u=7749491
All my Beginning Hoods as Shopping Districts plus Old Town. http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=523417
MooVille, a tribute to Mootilda and her fabulous lots http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=534158
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#8 Old 18th Dec 2013 at 1:02 AM Last edited by Peni Griffin : 18th Dec 2013 at 3:19 AM.
I'm not sure what that sentence means. I can hardly copy regedit files from one version of Windows to another; and the computers we have aren't networked, so I have to use the flash drive to transfer anything from either to any other computer.

Later: Dagnab it, now it won't run at all! Shortcut, start menu, navigating through Windows Explorer - nothing works!

Remembering that some people's games get screwed up after installing AGS, I uninstalled it; didn't help. Clicked autorun on the DVD out of curiousity - got the pop-up asking if I wanted to let the program make changes, and then, nothing. No activity on TaskManager. All I did this afternoon was add Tarlia's clean hoods. I'm completely at a loss here.

Thank goodness my new word processor works great or I'd be tearing my hair out.

(Later again: Ne'mind on that last bit! It occurred to me that I'd never cleared caches after the testing. Did that, and now it's loading. Previous stuff still applies AFAIK, though.)

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Mad Poster
#9 Old 18th Dec 2013 at 1:40 PM
It was for Drama Acres. Try to put Drama Acres on the desktop of another computer and see if it will copy over, if it wont then you may have a problem with your USB drive.

All my Beginning Hoods here at MTS. http://www.modthesims.info/member.php?u=7749491
All my Beginning Hoods as Shopping Districts plus Old Town. http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=523417
MooVille, a tribute to Mootilda and her fabulous lots http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=534158
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#10 Old 18th Dec 2013 at 2:03 PM
There isn't another computer to put it onto, and all the other neighborhoods have transferred successfully. It's just the storytelling file that won't copy.

I can probably work around that (oh, but I need my story albums!) but the language thing is driving me batty. I can't seem to get at the hex code from any angle; and till I change it all my beloved core sims will have stupid meaningless names that aren't even gender-appropriate. I'm almost desperate enough to call Microsoft tech support.

Almost.

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Née whiterider
retired moderator
#11 Old 18th Dec 2013 at 2:27 PM
If you click the More Details thing on the copy window, you should be able to see which file(s) it's having trouble with, which would be helpful.

What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact.
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#12 Old 18th Dec 2013 at 4:20 PM Last edited by Peni Griffin : 22nd Dec 2013 at 2:44 PM.
I can't click on the copy window. The error message comes up, the only option is to hit OK on it - right click, left click, error box, copy box, doesn't matter, all I can do is hit OK or switch screens. And the copy window vanishes with the error message, simultaneously. The error message does give me the file name, and at first I tried deleting that file; but then it just did the same thing on the next file, and the next, and any random file I tried to transfer. I tried it again this morning, just to make sure it still acted the same (because computer fairies do screw around with me a lot), and that's all I get.

On the plus side - I went over the tutorial on changing the language again (for the third time), went to the new computer, and went to regedit again - and this time I found what I was looking for right away. I must have confused a step during the trek across the hall (twice) yesterday, because there it was - Lang Value and DWord and Hex code and all. Only, the hex code already said 1 for US English, which was deeply confusing, but I figured hey, computer fairies and it's not as if I'm firing on all cylinders this week. So I opened the game, opened Drama Acres, and voila! Ernest and Sage Ann Munny are named Ernest and Sage Ann Munny, and all's right with the world. Even without finding the hex code yesterday I apparently managed to change it, only it didn't take until I shut the system down. Or something. So I'm befuddled, but happy.

I would still very much like to know what's going on with those storytelling files, but at least I can play again. It all goes to show that poking around enough, though slower than expertise, can get the job done.

Even later: Persistence pays off! After several experiments that always ended the same way, I happened to be present when my cat brushed up against the flash drive sticking out of the port and at the same instant the message popped up. The drive number for the USB port was no longer "USB Disk (J)" but "Removable Drive (J)." There'd been no visible change in the drive's position, but obviously the cat had unseated it enough that it couldn't communicate with the machine any more. And there's so many files in Storytelling, and my cat is so certain that the space in front of the tower belongs exclusively to her, that this unseating was inevitable at some point during the process.

So I zipped it into a .rar file, carried it across the hall, unzipped it in the right place, and loaded the game. Everybody's got their stories back!

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
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