Barbie Secret Agent

I have a customer who has been trying to get a game going that they bought their kids for Xmas -- Secret Agent Barbie. Their computer meets the minimum requirements for that game (and then some) plus they already have a lot of other Barbie titles installed and running fine. It's a Pentium-III 500MHz w/200Mb RAM, 13Gb HDD, ATI Xpert98 AGP card w/8Mb (using Rage Pro chipset), SoundBlaster PCI128 card (I think).

I helped them put all the newest drivers into the system (ATI, DirectX 8.1, etc.). The game has been uninstalled / reinstalled too many times to count. When I was there I installed the game (again) and the first time I ran it, the thing worked. After the first time, it's back to not working again. When you get into the game (past all the intros), the background displays fine but the characters are nothing but poloygons. It's almost like the DirectX is messing up the shapes in the game -- moving characters.

I have checked all the web sites I could find, but nowhere can I find mention of this game (one page with a few paragraphs of tips was all I could find -- no help there). If anyone else had these kinds problems (even with a different game) and solved it, I'd appreciate some input.

 

Is the resolution at 800 x 600? Also if the option is available try "software rendering " instead of 3d Video options...Rhett

 

Tried several different resolutions & colour depths including the minimum to run the game -- no help. Also, they don't offer a software rendering option because that was the first thing I checked. Appreciate the tip though.

**Note: I've been doing tech support for almost 20 years -- I have already tried any of the obvious things like driver updates, etc. I'm hoping someone has run across this problem and figured out how to fix it. More than likely that game just won't support the ATI Xpert98 video card, but the client's kids are pretty insistant on keeping the game.

**Just an addendum to this post -- I have already used DXDIAG to test the video system / card memory. All tests work 100% perfectly and all other games work too (including Flight Simulator 2002). This is the only game that will not run ....

 

More than likely it's ati's drivers, try a different driver, older, may work. ATI just does lousy drivers, that's all there is.
You should be able to get some older ones here
http://www.reactorcritical.com/download.shtml

No offense as I see you are from Canada, just my opinion of ati's driver support over the past

 

Thanks for the tip BrianF. Good idea, but doubt it would help. They already had the original driver for that card on the system (from when it was first installed almost 2 years ago) -- game didn't work with that one either. I'm going to file that link you supplied though -- might come in handy some day, thanks!

>> No offense as I see you are from Canada, just my opinion of ati's driver support over the past


I've had good luck with ATI in the past (other than with newer cards not having debugged drivers). Guess it's because I'm Canadian eh? lol -- no offense taken.

 

Brian:
they keep the good cards for cdn distribution, send the bad ones south
and we each get a free one every year when we file our income tax
LOL

Remember Nortel is a Cdn company too