Hi i just got this cool game and I have tried all of the things listed in the general help section as well as looked through some of the posts, but i stall haven't been able to get it to install directly. When i run the program the game logos leave a glitched ghost version of themselves and the Arcanum loading screen appears on the left half of the screen. After that it used to be at the main menu but the mouse would leave graphical glitches and i would not be able to choose anything. Now it doesn't even do that anymore. Any ideas?


Much appreciated.

What's your screen resolution? The original game runs at 800x600 I believe, but if this is higher than your screen resolution, it will probably cause problems. I ask because many Netbooks actually have fairly low-res screens.

To fix this, check out the High Resolution Patch (it's in a sticky thread in this forum). Although the high resolution patch was originally designed to allow higher resolutions than the original game, it actually lets you set ANY resolution you want, so you could theoretically scale it down to your screen resolution.

1024x576. I tried installing that mod but it said my width was too small?

Yeah it's probably that 576 that's giving you problems. Perhaps the high-res mod is not designed to go lower than 800x600 either. Anyone else know?

From mod's readme file: I'm sorry, but apparently OP is out of luck.

The problem is probably with the interface as it's designed for 800x600 resolution. In order to support lower resolution, whole interface would have to be redesigned (to fit everything on smaller drawing area) and redrawn and I doubt there's anyone willing to do it considering the amount of work needed.

Man lameeeeeee. The only reason I got it was due to the fact that i read a blog about games that were good for netbooks. Right.

:I

Well, many netbooks have a slightly higher resolution, specifically 600 vertical pixels, which would allow you to play Arcanum. But that is a bummer. If you hooked up a monitor to the netbook it would probably work, although that's not exactly portable. Otherwise you'll need to play on another computer, I guess.

Unless someone here knows of a workaround for netbooks?


EDIT:

I wonder if there might be a different problem. I would expect the game to just throw up a blank screen or even just crash out if the resolution doesn't fit. Also, googling suggests that many people recommend Arcanum for netbooks and no one notes any resolution problems. It sounds more like a directdraw issue actually. Anyone know of fixes for those?


EDIT AGAIN:


OK, try adding a "-no3d" line to the arcanum shortcut. Open the shortcut, find the "target" field, and add "-no3d", so it reads like this:

"c:\blah\blah\arcanum.exe" -no3d

Make sure the "-no3d" part is outside the quotes in the box. See if that helps at all.

It's possible that your notebook chip has the ability to run at higher resolutions than the 1024x576 the screen can display. These options are usually not ON by default so you'd probably have to look around for them in the display properties.

Take a look at this post, maybe some of tips in there will help you to look around for such settings on your notebook.

Alright, I will try the "-no3d" and see what happens. Thanks for at least trying to help me out!

I tried the display settings change but no luck i can only switch between the default and 640x480?? Weird...

Ahh no luck... I can hear the main menu but everything is glitched as usual


edit: Found the tickmark that scottsman mentioned, lets see if it works... It does. Thanks.

So you got Arcanum working? If so, that's great! If not, let us know and maybe we can help further.