Graphics Card Compatibility - FMS Hangs System at Startup

[Fly-Baay]

Sorry if this a rehash, but I couldn't find any help in previous posts on the subject:

I was running an old Stealth II G460 when I first installed FMS. I had to pull back the hardware accleration slider one notch under Display Properties, and leave textures off to get it to run without locking up my whole system (requiring a hard reset). The frame rate was useable but slow at about 10-12 frames/sec. I bought a parallel port interface cable for my transmitter from www.tti-us.com/sim and had quite a bit of fun flying and customizing models until I started to get bored with the untextured landscape, and still slow graphics performance.

So I bought a 64MB Excalibur AGP graphics card from Pine that uses the nVidia GeForce2 MX400 chipset. Unfortunately, it exhibits the same system-hang problem as the Stealth, unless I pull back the hardware acceleration slider TWO notches, which effectively disables all of the graphics acceleration functions, and results in a frame rate of about 1 frame/sec - totally useless in other words.

Did I just go too cheap on my graphics card, or do I have something else going on with my system (a PII 300 from Quantex)? No amount of finagling with color depth and resolutions seems to make any difference. Incidentally, I tried downloading and installing the 7.5.1 Alpha of FMS, but the installation program fails to run with the error that COLDET.DLL is missing. What's up with that?

Thanks,
Dave

[Fly-Baay]

All better!

After a little break from troubleshooting, I figured out that the 7.5.1 download was just the executable, moved it to my FMS program directory (where coldet.dll is), and it seems to run happily on this new graphics card. 25-30 1024x768 frames/sec with textures and smoothing and fog on. Looks great, and is so much easier to fly with the positional reference that the textures provide, especially the cloudy skies. Fantastic!

Dave