Holy Cows! I'd forgotten...

Calibrator on 30/12/2006 at 10:40

Quote Posted by Martek

It's a real shame that one of the best, if not the best, videocards available today won't run Thief. And basically due to driver issues that they may never fix.

Do older drivers not work with the GTX due to its brand new architecture?

IMHO it's purely a driver problem.
Most of the hardware advances of the newer cards concern features like shaders that aren't even used in the old Thief games.

The Nvidia driver v84.21 runs all Thief versions with 8xAA and 8xAF (not 4x) on my 7800GTX-SLI-rig without problems.

Any driver newer that that and it's "Bye bye Thief 1" (Thief 2 runs).

And yes, I tried any patches and configuration modifications under the sun (SLI enabled or not).

The problem is that newer games appear that need (or should have) newer drivers.
But with DirectX 10 (in Windows Vista) we'll have even more problems (no EAX-compatibility for example).
TDS may run but as T1 &T2 are my personal favourite games I'm not content with a platform that does not support these games.:nono:

Calibrator

Lightningline on 30/12/2006 at 12:27

I will do the same thing...Keep a machine for Thief 1 and 2. There is Including me right now (bills prevail) people who cant yet afford the latest and greatest and im sure they will keep on building missions, even new pepole come to us everyday and discover the joys of Thief and some of them are budding Dromedites. Even right now a Thief machine can be built for less than $200 US.
Right now there is a game that comes close and that is Dark Missiah Might and Magic. Is there an editor for that ? I am sure someone could make some pretty mean Thief like missions with that. It would be a huge undertaking though. Creating skins, sounds and such. But we still have The Dark Mod comming which seems to be the only hope for those who are running into my PC is to advanced for Thief 1 and 2 problems.

BrokenArts on 30/12/2006 at 15:46

Moral of the story kids, if you like your thief, keep an older machine running, and get your parts for it. I even thought too, eventually would the old drivers not be available anymore? Could happen, right now, not a problem, but, years down the road, one day, someone needs an old driver. Can't find it, :erm: It could happen.

The Fire Eater on 2/1/2007 at 19:45

The other alternate I would suggest, as this is what I have, is to have a duel boot system with an older OS setup on one partition/drive. Although I had to setup the Thief 1 demo in WIN98se, I have copied the shortcut from that OS desktop to my XP desktop and play it from there. I have done this same manuver for other games that needed to be installed or previously installed before I got XP included on this machine so that they are also playable in XP even with my newer drivers for this vid card (CAT 9) DirectX 9.0c, etc. Naturally I have an older set of drivers in WIN98se but again is playable in XP with the set of drivers in that OS for those games. However I do not intend to get Vista so that might be a problem for those of you who want to get it. Who really cares about getting a 3d desktop etc. that really isn't necessary, and all the bumpups in componets for it? NOT ME :D That OS isn't really going to do much for gaming as far as I can see...at least not for a long long time from what I've read about it.

redrider on 2/1/2007 at 20:57

Quote Posted by Calibrator

So does the latest ATI Catalyst driver for my newly installed Radeon 9550. I have an older computer and I just changed the video card to the Radeon and Thief II runs as good as ever on it. I haven't tried Thief I on it yet though.

bikerdude on 2/1/2007 at 21:17

Quote Posted by epithumia

That time is, unfortunately, now. At least my machine with 8800GTX cards is pretty much useless for Thief. The drivers are crappy enough that future updates might fix it, but I think we can all assume that fixing problems with Thief is not going to be high on the manufacturers' lists.

Doubly painful is the fact that my old PC won't even drive the monitor on my new one, so I'd have to keep an entirely separate setup to run Thief again.

Hi Epithumia

You can run thief on newer drivers by using the safe texture tweak in the user.cfg - I have tested it on 93.71 on my 7900GT and runs fine. I have also done a forced 97.44 driver install on my 7900GT and tested thief, it runs fine. So I guess it must be a hardware issue, the 8800 dont like thief! - you may want to consider the new R600 I am and its faster than the 8800 series aswell.

And on another note, Im looking at running thief via Virtual pc/VmWare - I shall keep you/the forum posted on this.

But that said the new ATI RD600 based card ar going to be out soon, and I may look at getting one of these instead of an 8800 based card.......

biker

Er namless, Epithumia and the others are not nubes. Its not an install problem for a start its a driver/hardware issue with 8800 card.

epithumia on 2/1/2007 at 22:46

Quote Posted by Bikerdude

You can run thief on newer drivers by using the safe texture tweak in the user.cfg - I have tested it on 93.71 on my 7900Gt and runs fine.

That may be true for 93.71, but the current drivers are 97.44 and the oldest thing that will work with an 8800 is 96.89, which were really more of an emergency and half-functional release so that they could ship the card with any drivers at all. (There's no OpenGL support at all in 96.89, for example.) Note that Nvidia no longer has unified drivers, and the 8800 drivers do not work for other cards, while the drivers for other cards are useless for the 8800.

At this point things are so broken that the Nvidia control panel won't even let you save any changes. I got Thief running perfectly a grand total of once, but since nothing actually got saved, I have no idea what random set of desparate changes I made to get it working. I will try again when the next set of drivers comes out.

Nameless Voice on 2/1/2007 at 22:55

Quote Posted by The Fire Eater

I decided that it had been along time since I played a Thief 1 game so I downloaded it and then much to my shagrin when I tried to install it into my portion of XP on this machine it said it couldn't because it seemed to have detected the NT coding that appears to be also somewhere in XP?

I'm shocked that and no one has immediately shouted "setup.exe -lgntforce" upon seeing this yet, so:

setup.exe -lgntforce

Getting Thief 1 to install in 2K / XP is the oldest trick in the FAQ...

Calibrator on 3/1/2007 at 19:01

Quote Posted by Nameless Voice

I'm shocked that and no one has immediately shouted "setup.exe -lgntforce" upon seeing this yet, so:

setup.exe -lgntforce

Getting Thief 1 to install in 2K / XP is the oldest trick in the FAQ...

Installing T1 is *not* the problem. *Running* it is!

bye
Calibrator

Nameless Voice on 3/1/2007 at 21:09

He never said anything about having trouble running it in XP. I'm just surprised that people let him go through that contorted method of installing it rather than pointing to the simplest solution.