Game wont load from game menu on desk top

[STIENER]

Gents
just got the game and loaded onto my PC a few days ago. put the latest patch in. game seemed to work fine. played a few one off battles against the AI. all seemed ok. tonite i put the game up and the 1st thing i did was change some of the game options.....hide tree's, no music, i think thats all i changed. game is in 1024X768 16BPP as is the default? i never changed that. as i went into the next screen in the game i got an error message ..said something like "cannot read file..reload game" [ sorry guys it all happened kinda fast and i didnt have ascreen shot program up to capture the message ]
i clicked on the "OK" on the error message and it went away, BUT the game seemed ok.......it ran. i played 2 or3 one off battles against the AI..every thing worked fine.

i exited the game and came back later and tried to reload the game from desk top from the game menu and i get a black screen with an error message "close combat error...not availible"
heres a screen shot of the message....i think?
i havent reloaded the game yet but im going to now.

[STIENER]

just deleted the game from the LSA menu and reloaded it. didnt load the patch... it still doesnt work!!! same message. this cant be good.........
loaded the patch......it still doesnt work.....same message! [&:]

what should i do gentlemen???????????

[STIENER]

OK.....i think its fixed......i was looking at the blank screen post......... see below......

Sounds like video codec issue. (WMV format)

Hold down ctrl when you click on play.

An options box will open up.

Turn off videos.

Try to update your video codecs then turn video back on.

i held down control and got the options box and turned off Videos and the play in "windows" boxes [ yes that was one of the boxes i clicked ON before ...forgot to mention that ] and now the game works fine.
i turned the video's back on because they worked fine before....SO its the PLAY IN WINDOWS MODE that doesnt work for me. bugger. oh well...i play mostly H2H any ways.
any idea why the "window"mode wont work?
[&:]

[xe5]

Does windowed mode work at other screen resolutions?

[squadleader_id]

Close Combat Error - Not Available...that's because your directdraw is disabled/unavailable.
Make sure you have ddraw enabled for WAR/TLD/LSA...the opposite with CC4/CC5 (disabling ddraw works best).

[STIENER]

Xe5......not sure but ill check........it worked in 800 X 600

Squad leader.......directdraw was on...i never turned it off. the game actually worked fine after the 1st error message...see above. there was 2 different error messages at different times.

[RD Oddball]

I sent an e-mail to Steve in the hopes he'll have something to add that might help you Stiener.

[SteveMcClaire]

The "Not available" error is DirectX telling us that your system does not support the type of device the game is trying to create.

If I understand what you've said above correctly, everything was working fine, and nothing about the game was changed in between the time the game was playing fine and the time the error came up. And now you get the error when the game tries to play a video, correct?

If so, then something else about your system must have changed between the time the game was working fine and started giving you the error.  Did you update video drivers, your OS, or install any other software, like video codecs or something like that?

For troubleshooting this, the DirectX Control Panel app would be really helpful.  You get it if you install the whole DirectX SDK (available for DL from Microsoft), but you can probably find it available for download by itself if you search the web.  If you have it / get it, you can verify the screen modes your display supports, and all the capabilities of the display device.

[Tejszd]

No Steve,

He changed the videos and Windowed options.

ORIGINAL: STIENER
i held down control and got the options box and turned off Videos and the play in "windows" boxes

[STIENER]

Steve
you didnt read my original post very well...its got nothing to do with playing the Video's [ never did ] ....i changed my option settings in the game.......see above. the "Windowed"setting is the option thats giving me trouble. the game works fine with out that box checked. Video's and all.
i run XP

[squadleader_id]

To underline my previous post...you can reproduce that error in STIENER's screenshot by disabling directdraw and then launching the game.

[SteveMcClaire]

ORIGINAL: STIENER
you didnt read my original post very well...

Ok, so you had changed the Windowed Mode option and did not realize that was the change that brought on the problem until you went back and used CTRL at game start-up to turn it off again. All the stuff about video issues was just quoting from another thread and had nothing to do with the problem. Is that correct?

At a guess I suspect your video card or driver does not support a window running in a different bit depth than your desktop. Close Combat uses a 16-bit color (RGB565) video mode. Most systems have their desktop resolution set to 24 or 32-bit color depth. You should be able to test this by right-clicking your desktop background, and setting your Windows desktop to 16 bit color. Then try to run Close Combat in windowed mode, and see if that works. If so then something on your system doesn't support or is preventing a normal window (as opposed to the exclusive mode window used when the game is set to run full screen) from using the lower bit depth.

What color depth do you usually run the Windows desktop in? Do you have more than one video card in the machine? Multiple monitors attached to it?

Steve

[STIENER]

steve

All the stuff about video issues was just quoting from another thread and had nothing to do with the problem. Is that correct? yes thats right.

im running 32 bit res on my desk top. only one video card and one monitor.

for now im ok with not running in windowed mode.....ill try changeing my color settings and see what happens.
thanks