I've been having a problem with an old game favorite called Motocross Madness 2 from Microsoft. When I migrated from XP to Vista(and now Windows 7) I noticed a peculiar problem with the graphics. On startup the game looked fine and at first I didn't notice that it wasn't bringing up the graphics card selection window. When you actually start playing the game though the terrain looks like flanel, very blocky and low resolution. The performance is also horrible when riding around. When I flipped back to the video settings I noticed it was defaulting to Software Rasterization rather than hardware. The check box to display a video selection on startup was checked but was obviously having no effect on the actual setting itself because I never see the selector box.
At some point I thought the game had just gotten beyond support and that it I would have to ditch it and move on even though I loved the tag ball mode which never seemed to make it into the sequels like MX vs ATV. The thing that got me thinking was when I install on my Vista laptop and the game ran fine with no graphical flaws at all. At this point I thought maybe it was an architecture problem because my workstation was Vista x64 and the laptop was Vista x86. However, this problem was discarded when I did my Windows 7 x64 upgrade and noticed the game ran fine on my media station. At first I thought it was Windows 7 but then when I upgrade my workstation the game still didn't function properly.
In the end it appears to be a system memory issue. My laptop and my media center both only have 3 and 2 GB of memory in them. I noticed, based on this fact, that the registry keys change based on that difference. Obviously I compared the registry settings on both machines and tried to duplicate the settings on the 4 GB workstation. While the settings took, the game would not function with the settings matched. The video card selector window would pop up, I'd chose the proper card and the game would simply close. If I return the registry settings to default, pull a stick of RAM and run things again the game runs without a hitch. So, rather than pulling RAM every time I want to play the game has anyone else ran into this problem and found a solution?
Obviously the game is old and was pretty much left unsupported by Microsoft a decade ago but I was just curious if any other nostalgic gamers out there have ran into similiar issues. Thanks!
Red
At some point I thought the game had just gotten beyond support and that it I would have to ditch it and move on even though I loved the tag ball mode which never seemed to make it into the sequels like MX vs ATV. The thing that got me thinking was when I install on my Vista laptop and the game ran fine with no graphical flaws at all. At this point I thought maybe it was an architecture problem because my workstation was Vista x64 and the laptop was Vista x86. However, this problem was discarded when I did my Windows 7 x64 upgrade and noticed the game ran fine on my media station. At first I thought it was Windows 7 but then when I upgrade my workstation the game still didn't function properly.
In the end it appears to be a system memory issue. My laptop and my media center both only have 3 and 2 GB of memory in them. I noticed, based on this fact, that the registry keys change based on that difference. Obviously I compared the registry settings on both machines and tried to duplicate the settings on the 4 GB workstation. While the settings took, the game would not function with the settings matched. The video card selector window would pop up, I'd chose the proper card and the game would simply close. If I return the registry settings to default, pull a stick of RAM and run things again the game runs without a hitch. So, rather than pulling RAM every time I want to play the game has anyone else ran into this problem and found a solution?
Obviously the game is old and was pretty much left unsupported by Microsoft a decade ago but I was just curious if any other nostalgic gamers out there have ran into similiar issues. Thanks!
Red