ATI 3D Rage Pro And D3D?

[SyntaxBubble]

I just can't figure this out. I have a computer with 128MB RAM. Also, it has a Pentium II 350MHz, along with a 16MB ATI 3D Rage Pro II+. I ran dxdiag.exe, and it all went okay. When I try to create a simple Direct3D window, it can't create the device. Can anyone give me an answer. I copied the code directly from the MS DX8 Docs. I order a book, too, from Amazon.com, that should be here in a few days. If you can help, please do!

[TechWins]

I'm not sure if this will help you or not but...

Back in October I bought Civilization 3, and it uses DirectX. When I tried playing it I could see the opening intro, but after that I couldn't see anything...it was all black. I could still hear the sound that was playing, though. So after about a week of trying a ton of different things I traded monitors with somebody (my brother) to see if it would work. Lone behold it worked.

Since I have the same video card as you it could be your monitor, but I'm not sure.

[SyntaxBubble]

I have even tried it on another computer. It has:

nVidia GeForce 4
512MB RAM

And I get the exact same error.

[Unregistered]

Be entirely sure that you are using the proper drivers for your monitor, and not just the general ones that windows comes with.

That's the most I can think of

[SyntaxBubble]

I will try that, but I don't think that's it. My error message for when CreateDevice() fails pops up. I am not sure it's the monitor. Like I said, though, I will see if I have the general drivers or the real ones.

[Unregistered]

Only reason I thought of that is because (going with the civilization thing) if you have general monitor drivers installed, the game won't run right.

[SyntaxBubble]

My monitor is a 15" color monitor. It's an IBM G74, and I can't find any drivers for it, except the ones which came with Windows. Where can I find them. I tried the IBM website, but they only have them for G76, G78, and G79.

[Coder]

All direct3D functions return HRESULTs
1 - Switch to the debug run-time, and max the warning level of Direct3D ( via the control panel applet )
2 - Run the sample in the debugger ( MSVC debugger ) : When an error occurs, it's going to tell you
3 - Check the result returned by IDirect3D8::CreateDevice() using GetErrorString & GetErrorDescription ( maybe these aren't the exact function names, but they're very close to the actual names )

[SyntaxBubble]

I don't use MSVC . I use Bloodshed Dev-C++, and I don't know how to use he GDB Debugger. Also, I can't find anything about GetErrorDescription, just D3DXGetErrorString(). That function gives me D3DERR_INVALIDCALL, which the docs. say:

D3DERR_INVALIDCALL
The method call is invalid. For example, a method's parameter may have an invalid value.

[Coder]

I found the names, in the SDK docs :
DXGetErrorString8 & DXGetErrorDescription8, both prototyped in dxerr8.h & implemented in dxerr8.lib


About the crash, I suggest that you use the DirectX caps viewer and check the caps of your ATI with the presentation parameters, see if something's not supported.