Home Register Arcade Gallery Chatroom Members Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Log In
Go Back   Inside: SereneScreen Fan Forum > SereneScreen Products > Marine Aquarium 3 for Windows
Notices

Reply
 
Thread Tools
Old 10-31-2008, 10:22 PM   #1
vdirjohn
Registered
 
Join Date: Feb 2008

Location: Round Rock, TX
Posts: 9
Translucent Fish

I have downloaded each of the 4 betas and still see the same problem. All of the fish are translucent - the top half of the fish can be seen but the bottom half, not at all. The background looks great - just the fish look wierd. I am running an ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro 256MB at 1680x1050x32 on a Dell Inspiron 530s running WinXP. According to the Catalyst Control Center, the driver packaging version is 8.42-070914a-053349C-Dell. Any ideas?
vdirjohn is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-01-2008, 10:30 AM   #2
feldon34
Forum Administrator
 
feldon34's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Rock Hill, SC
Posts: 10,937
Flagging this as a driver issue.

Can you check out Dell's website and see if they have an update for the driver for your laptop? If this were a regular PC, then you could skip Dell altogether and go straight to ATI's website and download the latest driver. But because it's a laptop, you usually have to use a Dell-branded version of the ATI driver as it has special settings for your laptop. Unfortunately, laptop manufacturers don't feel the need to spend extra time keeping drivers up to date.

There are also some websites around which have newer ATI drivers which have been modified to work with certain laptops.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman
feldon34 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-01-2008, 10:47 AM   #3
vdirjohn
Registered
 
Join Date: Feb 2008

Location: Round Rock, TX
Posts: 9
Translucent Fish

Thanks for the update. Actually the Inspiron 530s in a slimline tower - not a laptop. I will check out the ATI website for the latest driver.
vdirjohn is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-01-2008, 11:08 AM   #4
feldon34
Forum Administrator
 
feldon34's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Rock Hill, SC
Posts: 10,937
Oops.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman
feldon34 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-05-2008, 01:10 PM   #5
dboyd420
Registered
 
Join Date: Jun 2008

Posts: 25
I had same issue untill updating my driver from ATI
dboyd420 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-06-2008, 04:55 PM   #6
JEstr
Customer Service
 
Join Date: Nov 2007

Posts: 15
Starting with the Nov 2007 release, ATI drivers were causing this exact same problem with the fish in v2.6. The October 2008 update finally fixed it, but most laptop manufacturers haven't bothered to follow suit, so a lot of Laptop owners are up a creek still. You might try petitioning the manufacturer (or one of these laptop tweak sites) to try bringing the laptop drivers up to date with the current ATI release.

Desktop users merely need to update from the ATI site and this will fix their problem.
Customer Support
Prolific Publishing
JEstr is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-12-2008, 02:24 PM   #7
markknight
Prolific Team
 
Join Date: Jul 2007

Location: Burbank, Ca
Posts: 21
ATI, general

My laptop is a HP / Compaq nc8430. It has an ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 256mg card.
I had some errors with MA 3 so I deleted all ATI drivers and "uninstalled" the video card.
Attempting to load the drivers from ATI failed. (Diver dated Oct 15 2008 version 8.10) ATI gives the user a compatibility checker rather than the drivers initially. In my case it immediately informed me that I could not continue and directed me to HP for their version of the ATI drivers.
HP had the drivers and they loaded fine. Release date on theirs was Oct 5 2007 and version 8.45

The interesting part is MS Critical Updates.
Just before I began having problems I performed the update and included optional hardware updates. This was absolutely the problem in my case.
MS provides an update created by ATI that will load on an HP however, the patch date is March 2007 yet there is no indication or documentation what the thing is supposed to do or fix.

I have now run the routine three times tonight.
From ATI, they send you to HP
HP, loads and everything runs fine.
Load that patch from MS: MA3 has an immediate critical failure if left at the native resolution of 1680x1050. MA3 will run at 1024x786 but error on any higher setting. The failure message is generic. All other screen savers run but only allow a resolution of 1024x768.
Ignore the update from MS / ATI, everything ran fine even on multi monitors and a projector
markknight is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-12-2008, 02:49 PM   #8
Jav400
Administrator
 
Jav400's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2000
22 Highscores

Location: Tennessee
Posts: 9,725
Unfortunately MS updates like that generally stink. It doesn't supprise me that this happened. Thanks for the info specific to this version though.
Jav400 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-13-2008, 07:49 AM   #9
jleslie
Engineer
 
jleslie's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2002

Location: London, UK
Posts: 1,279
No promises but (for the X1600) you could try the Omega driver: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati.php
jleslie is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-13-2008, 04:05 PM   #10
JEstr
Customer Service
 
Join Date: Nov 2007

Posts: 15
I've seen that MS driver crash another laptop running MA3. My advice it to not use it, it causes way too many problems.
Customer Support
Prolific Publishing
JEstr is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-13-2008, 04:53 PM   #11
markknight
Prolific Team
 
Join Date: Jul 2007

Location: Burbank, Ca
Posts: 21
Thats what caught my eye. Regardless of driver version numbers look at the release dates.
MS is giving a patch that is older than the original driver or ATI's fixed driver. It is essentially rolling back the driver in someway and apparently breaking what was working fine without it
markknight is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply
Go Back   Inside: SereneScreen Fan Forum > SereneScreen Products > Marine Aquarium 3 for Windows



Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is On


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 10:58 AM.


Powered by vBulletin®
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.