The problems I was having was immediate reboots of WinXP when launching FMS.
I disabled the WinXP system option to restart on crashes which allowed me to then see the BSOD of Winxp. The BSOD showed the problem was in the ati2drad.dll.
Browsing on the web I read a couple of posts of instability especially on VIA motherboards when running 3d apps.
The suggestions were to upgrade the bios (I did to no effect)
Tweak the AGP write cache setting in the BIOS (I did to no effect)
Install the latest 4 in 1 drivers for VIA but choose to disable(uninstall) the 4x mode for the AGP driver during the driver install.
After doing the above I was happy to note that at least the immediate reboots when launching FMS stopped.
The frame rate was still pathetic 2 FPS but at least it was not crashing.
Encouraged by this I started tweaking the graphics settings of the FMS 7.5.1 alpha.
I finally found a combination that works for me.
Enabled Graphics options:
- 32 bit graphics depth
- Flip Back buffer
- Full screen mode
With the above settings I am getting between 30-60 FPS.
Switching to windowed mode drops the frame rate immediately to 2 fps.
So far the only glitch is that the cursor shows up as an ugly block.
Scrolling the cursor off the screen allows me to use FMS satisfactorily on XP on a system that I had nearly given up trying.
I hope the above description helps other users having similar problems with FMS on XP.
