Celestia Forums

my laptop is a p3 650 with 128k ram and i am using windows 98se. when i open celestia my mouse {touchpad) acts eraticly and if i move the first planet showing to the edge of the screen my computer locks up. i am not sure how many megs my video card has. i tried to load the 4 mb celestia to see if there was any difference from the 11mb but i still had the same problem. thanks in advance... i really want to see this work!

More info Please!
We need to know who built that laptop before we can start to do any kind of trouble shooting. By telling us the manufacturer we can go to there website and do a little search and find out like whos video chipset they built into it and how much VRAM is on board. Without more info we as in the others in the forum can't even begin to try and help you.

it is a winbook xl3, thanks!

Well I have checked out the specs on your notebook and have come to the conclution that there are 2 major problems here. The #1 problem is you only have 8megs of VRAM to play with and the second is that it is using an ATI mobility video chipset. The ATI mobility chip is a nuetered version of the desktop chip so you missing a few features. This was done for saving power. The only way you are going to get Celestia to work on this is to use all low res textures. I am talking about textures the size of 512x256. You might try 1024x512 but I think those will be to big. I don't know if the ATI mobility chip can compress textures using the DTX1 format. You might want to go to ATI's website and do a little reading to find out if it does. If it does suport texture comprtion than entering the line
CompressTexture true
under your texture line into each line for each planet in the solar system.ssc you may get Celestia to work. But I make no promises. I have got you this far. Do a little research on your video chipset at the ATI site and then you may find out for sure if you can use Celestia.
Also you will need to find out if the drivers you have for your video chipset have an OpenGL IDC. This is the drivers that tells the chip that your are trying to use an OpenGL program and to render in OpenGL instead of DirectX. Good Luck

reduce your texture sizes to 256 x 128 or maybe 512 x 256...Also you may not be able to run bumpmapping or specturals very well if at all...disable those...

Mostly the reason it locks on a laptop is because it runs out of video memory quick...I own a Dell P3 700 with 8 megs of ram and I cant even run Celestia worth a damn on it due to the fact its way too slow graphics wise...Plays DVDs great tho

8 megs of ram? wow ... must be pretty fast with swapping :D

8 megs of Vram 256 megs of regular unleaded

thanks people for the research... i will check into the ati site. it may be that i cant use this program... boo hoo! it looks cool! thanks again for the help.