Vista - Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and Vista, won't run.

Hello All!

I have Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, with the Soaked expansion installed. Everything was working fine, until, I tried to upgrade the drivers for my video card. Let's open the can of worms, shall we?

Card is old, supposedly not even good enough for Vista, though it works just fine. Here's what it is: NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX440 AGP8x.

My first sign to stop should have come when the NVIDIA website didn't even have Vista drivers for this card, but I pressed on, using various ForceWare versions from Guru3D, some digitally signed, others night. Through hours of researching this issue on the web, I found that Forceware 71.90 for XP, installed through the device manager should work, and it does. Before, the other drivers I was trying were causing Vista to load to a black screen.

But now, RCT3 does not work. First it was asking for DirectX 9 to be installed, now it's an unknown error, with no reason given. Vista tries to find a solution, and that is to contact ATARI, and ATARI apparently doesn't provide support for the game when it's installed into Vista.

Other folks have told me my card isn't good enough for RCT3, but it is, because it worked fine in the past, of course with almost no nice graphics, but that's okay for now.

My system meets the minimum specs for RCT3. They follow:

Vista Home Basic, build 6002
Pentium 4HT 2.8ghz
512MB RAM
300GB HD
and above mentioned video card.

Through researching why RCT3 won't work, everything on the net says it should because Vista has DirectX 9.0L, as well as all previous versions of DirectX. Other folks are receiving runtime errors, I haven't.

Right now, I'm getting the unknown error message, so I don't know if it's still coughing over DX9. Can anybody help?

Essentially, don't bother. You can get a splitting migraine for a few days or build a new pc that will be 3 times faster for a little $$$. A geforce MX card and 512MB RAM? Does Vista take a few minutes to open explorer?

I will bother because upgrading just isn't an option right now. I have better things to spend my money on at the moment. I don't use Internet Explorer, but Firefox gets up and going just fine, matter of seconds. If you meant Windows Explorer, yes, it can be slow, but I deal with what I have.

Download the directx user runtime for directx 9.

I did that, and it wouldn't install. It made like it would, and then just said all files are up to date or something along those lines.

Anyways guys, I solved the problem by System Restoring back to 9/21/09, long before I ever started tweaking the drivers. Then I was finally able to uninstall and reinstall RCT3, and it now works again.

It sucks because I would really like to be able to use those 71.90 drivers again, and I want the NVIDIA control panel to manually set some quality and performance settings.

I may try again, as they are digitally signed, and the first batch I used were not, and that's where I believe my troubles started.

I run RCT2 on my Vista Home premium computer, with 3 gigs of ram. My comps Specs on the forums here.

512 megs is not much ram to run Vista in.

That's an understatement.