Celestia Forums

I have installed this wonderful program on every computer I have laid my hands on

I installed 1.2.4 succesfully on a HP Omnibook XE3 laptop (547 MHz Celeron, 64 Mb RAM, display adapter: S3 Savage/IX w/MV, Win98SE). It runs quite well, albeit a bit jerkily.

But 1.2.5pre7 crashes immediately. I wonder what causes this? (It is the S3, right?)

karhyv,

What version of the OpenGL drivers are installed?
1.2.4 can show you that from its help nenu.

Did you make sure that you have the very latest hardware drivers installed?

You'll probably need to download them from HP's Web site, since different vendors use slightly different glue logic with the laptop graphics chips.

v1.2.5pre7 opens a window and then crashes immediately if you only have Microsoft's default software OpenGL v1.1 drivers installed. Chris is aware of the problem. I think he hasn't tried to fix it because, so far as he knows, pre7 works fine with most 3D chips once the current hardwre drivers are installed.

You need to find out if your notebooks S3 video chip has it own memory or if it uses the shared memory sceme. If it uses the shared memory sceme and I believe that model does thats what your problem is and there isn't going to be anyway of fixing it. having a shared memory system slows video down quite a bit. In your case the only fix I hate to say is to replace the notebook. But that can be very costly. Sorry to give you bad news.

That explains it: I have only OpenGL v1.1 drivers. There are no newer drivers, OpenGL or video, available for the S3 Savage. :(

But it is not a big problem, 1.2.4 works adequately with S3. And, anyway, I use Celestia on my desktop machine with GeForce 4 Ti 4600, which I bought specifically for this purpose. Truly awesome, both GF4 and Celestia. :D