Can't Start Celestia 1.5.1

[ClarkyAC]

Hi, someone recommended me to this programme and thought i'll give it a try, but...

Version: 1.5.1
GFX: 2 x 3870 (crossfired)
OS: Windows vista + Windows 7 (does it on both)

I cannot start the program at all, it opens up and appears to load, then shows a colourful screen (top right corner says real time so I'm guessing it has loaded fully) and then turns white and windows says "this program has stopped working"



Any known issues?

*UPDATE*

Seems like i can access the program from the demo short cut in the program folder. The earth is fine, however, when the demo tries to view the moon, the program becomes slow and then orbits nothing (issue with the render of the moon?) I have also noticed once the moon has been viewed (or not been viewed in my case), i no longer can see anything other than background stars. The multicoloured object at the start seems to be the sun, and after viewing the moon, the sun becomes a "glowing ring".. Something wrong with the drivers?

[selden]

These kinds of problems are usually caused by bugs in the OpenGL graphics drivers. AMD/ATI's OpenGL support is not the best. The drivers provided with Windows are particularly bad. Please update to the most recent drivers available from ATI's Web site.

Your description is consistent with errors in the vertex shader routines. As a workaround, you can tell Celestia to avoid using vertex shaders.

When Celestia has started, type a Ctrl-V several times to step through its Render paths. It'll flash their names on the screen. Basic and Multitexture should work for you.

If that fixes the problem for you, you should consider reporting the problem to AMD/ATI.

[ClarkyAC]

unfortunatley, changing the rendering style has not fixed it, does it on all styles including Basic, and Multitexture

i can see earth and stars and ISS, anything else crashes when it appears on screen =/

[selden]

The next thing to try is to disable crossfire. It might be due to an interaction between the dual graphics accelerators. Again, that would be a driver bug which would need to be reported to AMD/ATI.

You might also try disabling hardware graphics acceleration entirely, to see if that helps the stability. I don't know how that works when crossfire has been implemented. Presumably one of the cards is disabled.