LaslowNET Technical Rants, HOWTOs, and Writing

I'm re-posting this from another blog I contribute to, Carnival of Wank.

As I’ve been testing Windows 7, I thought it would be fun to dig out some old games. Rifling through my collection, I found and installed the Neverwinter Nights Diamond disk and figured it would be worth a shot to try.

The game installed without issue, however it would not update (the patch utility would download it, but then said the file was invalid). After popping over to Bioware’s website, I downloaded the manual patch, and it went in without issue.

Running the game was another story. After configuring to the highest video settings and resolution possible (which ran great under Windows XP), I tried to open from the launcher app (nwn.exe). Nothing happened. Remembering that it had an issue with UAC and Windows Vista, I set the compatibility mode options to force nwmain.exe to run as Administrator, and the game launched.

All looked good during the intro movies, however when I got to the menu screen, scrolling black lines (like the ones that show up when your refresh rate is buggered and your video card is dying) filled the screen. I fought with this for quite a while, and found that in order to get it to work you need to manually edit the following files (note that this is case sensitive and spacing counts!):

In ‘nwn.ini’, set the following in the [Display Options] section:

AllowWindowedMode=1
FullScreen=0

In ‘nwnplayer.ini’, set the following in the [Game Options] section:

Client CPU Affinity=1

And finally, in ‘nwnconfig.ini’, set the following in the [Processor] section (note that the ‘Speed’ setting should be your speed in Mhz):

NumCPUs=1
Speed=3000

As a result of this, your game will be in Windowed Mode, however it will play. The appears to be the result of the game detecting the video card as being an ‘RDPD Chained DD’ device - for some reason it detects the Remote Desktop video device as the primary display adapter.

Update: Probably should have included this originally, but if you haven't already, make sure that you've updated to the latest Windows 7 compatible video card drives from the card manufacturer. Do not rely on the drivers provided by Windows Update, as they are often significantly more limited than the ones from Nvidia/ATI/Intel/etc....

Update #2: According to Alain from the comments below, if you are experiencing lagging issues with NWN on Windows 7, the issue is likely due to the 1.69 patch. He suggests uninstalling NWN, then reinstalling and only patching to 1.68.

Update #3: IMPORTANT (05/17/2010): You should also make sure that you have the latest DirectX 9 Runtime installed - Windows 7 does not include most bits of the DirectX 9 Runtime which can cause problems. You can download the (at time of posting) latest full version here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0cef8180-e94a-4f56-b157-5ab8109cb4f5