Infinity Engine: 12-year-old software on 6-month-old hardware

So I got an urge to play an Infinity Engine game. You know the ones: Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Torment... great games, every single one.

I got out and installed Baldur's Gate 2 (with expansion) and, my personal all-time favorite RPG ever, Torment. Unfortunately, such antiquated software doesn't like machinery that was made in the modern era (probably out of fear of Skynet). So these games run into "issues".

There are a million different issues that can develop due to our mysterious hardware of the future, and a million different options to fiddle around with in the games (color depth, 3d acceleration, etc.). Each setting that's flipped will likely end up fixing a subset of issues (like blocky black fog of war, lag during spell effects), while enabling another subset.

So rather than spending an afternoon messing with settings, I thought I'd come here. Anyone know the best way to get BG2 and/or Torment working, as flawlessly and beautifully as possible, on my Windows 7 supercomputer from space?

I know I've gotten Icewind Dale I and II to run on a Vista machine before - and that took a ton of tweaking (and different sorts of tweaking for each). But the same stuff doesn't work with BG2. My worst problem currently seems to be that I'm getting lag during spell effects (which at first I thought might be because my CPU was slower than 600MHz, but I checked, and my CPU has 4 cores each of which can actually do over 4 times this speed, so I don't think my CPU is too slow for this game ).

 

Have you tried setting compatibility settings to windows 95/98?

 

I installed BG2/Exp onto my laptop and it worked fine, don't remember any big display issues.

 

I think you should buy a 12 year old notebook, to get the full experience
Or maybe just install xp?

 

aren't there some widescreen engine updates for these games.

nvidia graphics card fixes: http://www.shsforums.net/index.php?showtopic=30840

widescreen mod for some infinity engine games: http://www.gibberlings3.net/widescreen/

troubleshooting post for said mod: http://forums.gibberlings3.net/index.php?showtopic=12988

 

Ooh, widescreen update is an attractive one. I might have to try that.

 

yeah. GL getting it to work.

 

Hah! Very amusing seeing this game in 1080p! Everything's so tiny...

 

yeah that's the downside but hey...you get to see more of the map if nothing else.

 

This is what's going to fix your display issues. Using hardware acceleration on 8800 (g92) cards causes glitches.

 

If it runs in XP, then use VirtualBox, it supports Direct3D. Granted you will need an XP license.

My biggest issue has been getting Win9x games to run. Several will only run on Win9x and hate XP, Vista, or 7 even with compatability modes. I mean you have DosBox for old DOS titles, VirtualBox for XP stuff, but no support for Win9x...

 

No need for vitrualbox or any compatibility shenanigans, I have been playing Infinity Engine games since they came out on any computer I have had at the time. Currently got BG1+BG2 installed using the Tutu mods to let me play BG1 in the enhanced BG2 engine, with a widescreen mod to allow 1680X1050. It all just works, running it on Win7 x64 at present, both laptop with Nvidia and desktop with ATI.

If the OP has any specific issues, the The Gibberlings Three site will likely help.

 

So I got all the graphical issues to go away, mostly by setting it in 3d Acceleration mode. That was easy.

Then I got the game patched, then got the widescreen mod working (I think 1600x900 will be a lot less painful than having to squint to see the speck on the screen that is my character in 1080p!).

All was going great! Then I remembered all of those mods and Ease of Use goodies on Gibberlings Three (I used all this stuff when I had an All Things Icewind Dale marathon a while back - oh man those games are fun!). I got to installing mod after mod, and I modded the game literally to death. Now it's gone back to its original resolution, and as soon as the game gets to the menu, I get an in-game popup window (with the game's GUI, not a Windows popup) that's completely blank, with two blank buttons I can't push. It never goes away, and I have to alt-F4 out of the game.

Sigh. Probably has to do with the fact that I *may* have installed or patched one or two things in the wrong order. I'm gonna try uninstalling and reinstalling the whole thing from Square One tomorrow.