Frictional Games Forum (read-only)

Re Amnesia: The Dark Descent

My friend recently bought this game for me as a gift. It loaded OK, but when I try to play it gets to the screen where it asks for a new character Profile and then the mouse freezes up and will not move. Sound does not seem to be affected.

I am using Windows 7
NVidia-GeForce 6200 graphics card (PCI-e)
USB mouse
CPU=Intel Dual Core 3.22Ghz

I have tried the following:
(1) Replaced the SDL.dll file ver. 1.2.14.0 with ver. 1.2.15.0
(1a) Replaced the SDL.dll file with ver. 1.2.13.0
(2) Disabled display scaling
(3) Changed mouse from USB to old-style cable mouse
(4) Updated with 1.2 and 1.3.1 patches
(5) attempted a work-around by using ALT / TAB
(6) Changed from full screen to window mode
(7) Tried using several different display resolutions

Nothing solved the problem.

Next. I tried loading the game onto my older computer, still on WIN XP-SP3, which also uses NVidia-GeForce 6200 but AGP, not PCIe. (CPU=Intel Dual Core 2.7Ghz, USB mouse) Same problem. Tried all of the same fixes listed above, but with no effect.

It almost certainly has to do with the ancient graphics card and not the mouse or the library responsible for it. Nvidia 6-series are the borderline for Amnesia and even it works, the performance won't be good. Make sure you have the latest gpu drivers installed and try again.

(06-19-2015, 11:34 PM)plutomaniac Wrote: [ -> ]It almost certainly has to do with the ancient graphics card and not the mouse or the library responsible for it. Nvidia 6-series are the borderline for Amnesia and even it works, the performance won't be good. Make sure you have the latest gpu drivers installed and try again.

Yes, I have installed the latest gpu drivers from NVidia's website. It made no difference. On the Minimum Requirements section of the game package it says "ATI Radeon X1000 or NVidia GeForce 6 video card." Since my card is nVidia 6200, I would think the game ought to work with it. If the game was made to work with that card when first released, it should still work with it, no?

That depends, the game has been updated multiple times since 2010. Also, contrary to the newer Amnesia A Machine for Pigs, The Dark Descent listed the bare minimum requirements and those are usually hit & miss based on driver support, card configurations etc. The GeForce 6 basically means hign-end 6-series, 6200 is very low end even for such old cards.

Anyway, after the freeze occurs close the game and attach HPL.log as mentioned at the Troubleshooting Guide, Problem X.