What's the point of compatibility settings in Win 7?

[MasterBlaster76]

I just bought Rome Total War again (there are some amazing mods coming out for it) - White Label edition, but it refuses to work on my system.
I have tried all kinds of compatibility settings, restarting the PC and so on, but no joy. I have patched up to v1.5.

If I try with a compatibility setting, it just displays a 'Rome Total War has stopped working' message. If I start it normally, it gets to the intro video, and then drops back to the desktop. If I press alt-tab, it returns to the game, loads to the menu, and then keeps dropping back to desktop, but not a CTD, it just goes back to the desktop as though you'd pressed alt-tab. Actually, it only got that far once - now, it usually just goes back to the desktop and refuses to load it at all. Once, it loaded it fine, but the game was stuffed into a little tiny window in the corner of the screen(!)

Has anyone managed to get this edition working with Win 7 64bit? If so, please help!

Thanks in advance.

Edit: It's annoying - I used to have Rome Total War - the full price version, but I sold it (yes, I know - dumb). Now, I have a new rule: unless a superior version of a particular TW game era comes out, no selling TW games! And I'm never touching these White Label things again - they're nothing but trouble!

The game works fine under actual Win XP - isn't Compatibility mode supposed to mirror those conditions?

 

[Abhas]

Didn't you have that minimizing to the desktop problem earlier? It could be linked to that.

 

[sachin_rocks]

no compatibility may work for some applications because it just changes some settings while ruuning the program

but if you have win profesional and above there is a xp mode which run win xp using virtual box or emulator(i dont know) means the application is running on xp in one window so that will make it work if it did in xp

 

[sohum]

I'm fairly sure I've given you directions to get Windows XP Mode--but you will need a version higher than Home Premium (Professional/Ultimate) to be able to get it. Anyways, that would be running a virtual machine, which wouldn't give you ideal gameplay.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the purpose of the compatibility settings are, myself. I've never actually successfully managed to run software under compatibility settings when they don't work. Thankfully, I don't have too many problems running software in the first place.

 

[MasterBlaster76]

Didn't you have that minimizing to the desktop problem earlier? It could be linked to that.

Maybe, but this does it literally every few seconds - usually, it does it every now and then, but it doesn't actually stop you playing the game.

I'm fairly sure I've given you directions to get Windows XP Mode--but you will need a version higher than Home Premium (Professional/Ultimate) to be able to get it. Anyways, that would be running a virtual machine, which wouldn't give you ideal gameplay.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the purpose of the compatibility settings are, myself. I've never actually successfully managed to run software under compatibility settings when they don't work. Thankfully, I don't have too many problems running software in the first place.

Yes - I can't use XP Mode with this version of Win 7. I don't have problems getting things working in Win 7 either: this is the first time I've had problems with a game. At least I can play it in XP - not ideal, but better than nothing. It's a very old game, but there are mods coming out for it that have done a fine job of making it look much more up to date. If anyone's interested, search 'Roma Surrectum II' at twcenter.net.

 

[Highlander999]

Ahh, RTW, that was a classic game. Still got it installed so might head over there and see what mods they have.

 

[angryangy]

Probably antivirus conflict

 

[MasterBlaster76]

It works fine in Win XP though, and that's probably got far more AV BS installed on it than Win 7.

 

[angryangy]

You could have different issues between two XP installs, much less different OS versions. It's to be expected of a newer OS that things work a bit differently, otherwise, why make new ones?

 

[MasterBlaster76]

I just bought Rome Total War again (there are some amazing mods coming out for it) - White Label edition, but it refuses to work on my system.
I have tried all kinds of compatibility settings, restarting the PC and so on, but no joy. I have patched up to v1.5.

If I try with a compatibility setting, it just displays a 'Rome Total War has stopped working' message. If I start it normally, it gets to the intro video, and then drops back to the desktop. If I press alt-tab, it returns to the game, loads to the menu, and then keeps dropping back to desktop, but not a CTD, it just goes back to the desktop as though you'd pressed alt-tab. Actually, it only got that far once - now, it usually just goes back to the desktop and refuses to load it at all. Once, it loaded it fine, but the game was stuffed into a little tiny window in the corner of the screen(!)

Has anyone managed to get this edition working with Win 7 64bit? If so, please help!

Thanks in advance.

Edit: It's annoying - I used to have Rome Total War - the full price version, but I sold it (yes, I know - dumb). Now, I have a new rule: unless a superior version of a particular TW game era comes out, no selling TW games! And I'm never touching these White Label things again - they're nothing but trouble!

The game works fine under actual Win XP - isn't Compatibility mode supposed to mirror those conditions?

OK - an update is required to this. Over the weekend, my 'net has been down completely - no connection at all. I tried playing Rome in Win 7 (and Sid Meier's Pirates! - which was also doing the same sort of thing) and guess what? No problems at all - they didn't drop back to the desktop once. Now my 'net is up and running again, the problem has returned. I have found a workable solution: disable the wireless adapter if I'm playing those games, as neither needs to go online. With this in mind, can anyone shed light onto why that's happening when the net connection is up? Could there be a program I've installed that's causing this?

MasterBlaster76 added 1 Minutes and 6 Seconds later...

Didn't you have that minimizing to the desktop problem earlier? It could be linked to that.

Most likely, but I never found out what was causing that either - or if you did tell me, please remind me as I've forgotten. :o

Edit: I have done numerous virus, spware and adware scans and all came back clean. There must be some sort of program causing an issue - I need to find out what it is and decide if I really need it or not.

 

[sohum]

Does the game have an online component? It could be that the game, if it finds a working network connection, tries to use it phone home or download game updates or something. When there's no net connection, that code doesn't execute. So it might be the way the game is using the network adapter.

 

[MasterBlaster76]

Rome does, but Pirates doesn't.

Other than that, is there any sort of program that might cause this? Obviously you can't know all the programs that are on my system - there are far too many to list, but if you could give me an idea as to the type of program that could cause this, that would be good.

 

[sohum]

Well my guess is that it is the game itself. The online component is crashing the game when it is trying to exchange data.