Monitor Issue when Starting Game

[avyeal]

Monitor Issue when Starting Game

My friend is trying to play D2 with me since I came back yesterday.

For some reason, when he starts D2, the monitor instantly goes black and his power light begins to flash. Sound is still heard and everything...eventually he'll wind up at the main menu screen and we can hear the music, but nothing is being displayed. Even if the game is altF4 the monitor does not return.

If he reboots, the display will work fine until he gets to the login screen and then everything goes black again. It'll only work if he waits a good 20-30 minutes before trying again.

I'm all out of ideas as to what is happening, we've reinstalled twice and I don't think it's a driver issue because we play newer games regularly without any issues. D2 is fully patched with LoD and is up to date.

Any ideas? Really appreciate the help.

 

[Orphan]

Re: Monitor Issue when Starting Game

Are you using DirectDraw or Direct3D? You can switch between these two video modes using the D2VidTst program in the installation directory, and should try the other (most likely DirectDraw) to see if it works.

Also, what happens when you run the game in window mode? Just create a shortcut to the Diablo 2 executable and in the properties, add a -w at the end of the path (so it'll appear something like "c:\.....\diablo2\diablo 2.exe" -w).

 

[Technomancer]

Re: Monitor Issue when Starting Game

Hmm, this sounds similar to something I was experiencing a few years back. I never found out what the problem was, so I'm afraid I can't help. It didn't originally do that on that system, I stopped playing for a while, came back and bam(!), pretty much exactly what you're describing. I had quite a bit of junk installed by that point and it finally disappeared when I put together a new system. Surely there must be a way to resolve it without a bust out job, but I failed to find it.

BTW, that's NOT why I busted out.

 

[krischan]

Re: Monitor Issue when Starting Game

That doesn't sound like a monitor problem, but one with the gfx card. It seems that it ceases to produce a signal, so the monitor goes into suspend mode. Apart from getting the latest driver for it, try running the video test program (D2VidTst.exe) and select a different option when asked after it did the tests.

You probably don't have to wait for 20-30 minutes if you do a cold reboot of the system (i.e. not just by selecting reboot in the start menu, but by selecting shut down, waiting half a minute and switching it on again).

Did you try the glide wrapper (http://www.svenswrapper.de/english/downloads.html)? If you didn't, copy the dll which comes with it into the D2 directory, rerun the video test program and select glide.