Battlezone 1

I got a new machine recently. It's an HP multimedia PC with an Intel QuadCore Q6600, 4 GB RAM, Vista 64 bit and an eForce Nvidia 9600GT card with 512 MB. I haven't been able to get an original install BZ to run on it, nor BZ 1.4L. However, I do have BZ 1.4M running. To get BZ 1.4M going, I had to set the desktop icon compatibility to Win XP/2000. No other adjustments, tweaks, etc were necessary, including the render.cfg file.

I haven't experienced any of the other BZ player's complaints about Vista or the later Nvidia drivers, such as lag, slow frame rates, low visibility in games (looks dark), missing or distorted radar, etc.). Everything looks and works fine. The video driver is dated Jan 08.

And no, I haven't monkeyed with vsync. It is on and I'm showing 60 fps.

There's something about 1.4M that has improved the Vista compatibility, but I don't know what though. I can say for sure that the newest Radeon cards aren't compatible, at least with Vista 64 bit, because I had originally bought a Radeon HD 4850 as an upgrade and no matter what I turned on/off in render.cfg or the Radeon software, I kept getting the old 'unhandled exception' error. I had to return the card.

Good luck.

I will say that so far, 1.4M is the ONLY version of BZ that will run on my 64 bit Vista machine. If it wasn't for 1.4M, I wouldn't be playing BZ right now, not without drive partitioning, XP loading, setting up dual boot, etc... Anyone developing future upgrades for BZ should dissect 1.4M and try to figure out why it works with Vista.

I installed 1.4M on my Vista 64 bit machine and it was the ONLY version of BZ that would run! (albeit in XP/2000 compatibility mode). I tried BZ 1.4, 1.4L and BZE. All gave unhandled exception errors no matter what I did in the render.cfg file or in the video card configuration.

I couldn't get my 64 bit Vista system to work on anything but BZ 1.4M. Also, I couldn't get 1.4M or the other versions of BZ to work either with a Radeon HD 4850 video card. My system is a an Intel QuadCore Q6600, 4GB DDR2 RAM w/ ASUS motherboard. I pulled the Radeon card and put in an Nvidia 9600GT video card and I could get BZ 1.4M working, but not BzE, BZ 1.4 or BZ 1.4L. I tried every combination I could think of in render.cfg and the video card software, turning things on and off. I wasted a couple of days doing this. I finally downloaded 1.4M from Spock's website and after I installed it and set the launch icon to XP/2000 mode, BZ 1.4M ran flawlessly, no other adjustments needed.

It may not work for you, but I'd give it a try.

Here's a link for 1.4M

Don't forget to download the expansion pack too. Good luck.