No Ingame videos in Vista

from Stardock Forums
In Windows Vista the ingame cinematics are either displaying a blank screen or 'get stuck' in the first frame. The sounds can be heard normally and you can escape the video by pressing ESC. I used to play SR2 in Windows XP and there the videos played fine. The space battles and land battles work fine.

I tried fiddling with the compatibility mode but to no avail. I also tried with 3 different Nvidia drivers (Microsoft's release drivers, 100.65 and 101.41 Beta) but the problem remained.

Oddly enough the 1C and Elemental Games logos play when the game starts up so I assume the game is having problems with a certain codec/video types only.

Cinemaware's support site seems to be neglected so this seemed to be the only reasonable place to post this 'feature'.
Is there any hope getting this great game run properly in Windows Vista?

Has anyone else tried Rangers in Vista?
984 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
I have tried to install Space Rangers 2 in Vista Enterprise 32 bit. The installation program reports that OS is not supported.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
I didn't even know there were videos in the XP version of the game? When people talk about "in game videos", what are they referring to?

I swear, I looked through all the options and couldn't find a setting to turn it on, but maybe I'm just slow...

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Space Rangers 2 has some opening movies (publisher intro, developer intro and game intro). They get stuck on frame 1 on both my XP and Vista boxes at the office, but only mine. My home PC and co-workers PCs all show them normally. I'm afraid there's no fix for this issue.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Thankfully those are the only movies to worry about. The sensible solution is to turn them off in the options so you never have to deal with them when starting the game again.

The game itself works fine. I'm on Vista Home Prem.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Cinemaware Marquee used to offer a patch that (allegedly) fixed this issue a while back. But they made it a point to never let people really have access to it, so the patch is dead.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
After updating to Reboot, I haven't had any trouble with the movies playing. Not sure why...
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
Same here btw. I have Vista Ultimate 64 bit, and an XP Pro machine. On my XP machine things were always just fine, but on the Vista one it wouldn't play any intro movies. Updating to Reboot resolved the entire issue for me on the Vista machine. The game runs like a champ so far.