Celestia Forums

I got this on a P2/225. Win98. Trident 9440 graphics card.

It runs most other S/W fine.
I also ran siome diagnostics on it (HotCPU, CPUBurn, Perftest, all Freeware/Shareware S/W) with no problems.
Yes, it's an old CPU/graphics card, however it's been retired from the front lines to a games/backup machine.

-----
CELESTIA caused an invalid page fault in
module CELESTIA.EXE at 0167:00414bb2.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0167 EIP=00414bb2 EFLGS=00010206
EBX=00bb07e0 SS=016f ESP=0070fbb0 EBP=000001e0
ECX=00000000 DS=016f ESI=00000000 FS=3fcf
EDX=0000009c ES=016f EDI=bff532df GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
8b 4a 6c 8b 70 6c 3b ce 75 14 8b 4a 70 8b 70 70
Stack dump:
00000001 000001e0 816486fb 80000000 00000000 00000000 00000ba0 00000aa5 0070fbf8 bff7a550 00aa0000 bff7a567 00aa0000 00000000 00000000 00001000
-----

Bob,

You'll have to upgrade the graphics card.

Celestia uses OpenGL, and Trident only supports OpenGL on their 9880, Blade, and later chips.

See their FAQ at
http://www.tridentmicro.com/site/go.asp?newsid=9&dest=drivers

The prereleases of 1.2.5 don't even work with OpenGL 1.1 or earlier, although v1.2.4 does work with many of the older versions of OpenGL.

Sorry.

<snip>
Bob,

You'll have to upgrade the graphics card.

Celestia uses OpenGL, and Trident only supports OpenGL on their 9880, Blade, and later chips.


<snip>

That's not quite true, actually.
I had Celestia working previously on an even older processor using the same Trident 9440.
About a year ago, I had it working on a Cyrix Pr200, that had also been retired, in the same mobo and using the same 9440 graphics card. It was determined that the Cyrix was too slow to make it usable.
The Cyrix went to the bit bucket, and was replaced with the P2/MMX salvaged from another machine (nothing gets thrown out here at morlok's mishegas mansion ;-)).
So....
Relying on the fact that I had it working a year or so ago (actuially, last FEB), I tried to reconstruct what I had.
The only other thing I could think of was the revision of Celestia itself.
I found an older version of Celstia, V1.2.2 at:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/cele ... e?download

and loaded it.
It works fine.

I don't quite understand why, as you said (and the Trident web site confirms) that the 9440 doesn't OFFICIALLY support OpenGL, but....
it works.
It's interesting that the older version, which (I assume) also uses OpenGL, works but 1.2.4 doesn't. It's fun to speculate why.

I've played with it abit, and it runs markedly faster than the old Cyrix piece of stuff ;-)

One thing I've noticed (and I note that the subject appears in at least one other note posted in the forum) is that the screen is very dark. Even with the bright/contrast cranked to 11, some objects are barely visible; at 'normal' bright/contrast, objects like asteroids&comets are nearly invisible.
I wonder if the palette is somehow being set incorrectly, as other applications appear normal in brightness/contrast ('normal being a relative term).

BTW:
I found several sites that mention older versions, sourceforge was the one I selected because I had heard of it previously.

All in all, it is an excellent program..... at least the old version ;-)
It's a keeper.

morlok wrote:<snip>

That's not quite true, actually.
I had Celestia working previously on an even older processor using the same Trident 9440.
About a year ago, I had it working on a Cyrix Pr200, that had also been retired, in the same mobo and using the same 9440 graphics card. It was determined that the Cyrix was too slow to make it usable.

Believe it or not, Celestia 1.2.5 even runs on my Commodore 64 in the basement;-)

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:

morlok wrote:<snip>

That's not quite true, actually.
I had Celestia working previously on an even older processor using the same Trident 9440.
About a year ago, I had it working on a Cyrix Pr200, that had also been retired, in the same mobo and using the same 9440 graphics card. It was determined that the Cyrix was too slow to make it usable.

Believe it or not, Celestia 1.2.5 even runs on my Commodore 64 in the basement;-)

Bye Fridger

It runs on the vic 20 too right?

Rassilon wrote:It runs on the vic 20 too right?

Right, but only with the latest drivers...

Bye Fridger

Yeah I have them somewhere on a cassette...Give me 30 minutes to load them

morlok,

I'm glad you found a version of Celestia that works.

Unfortunatley, Chris (the graphics expert who is the primary author of Celestia) has explained several times that he only has Nvidia cards, so he has to depend on the OpenGL drivers supplied by the other graphics chip vendors to be stamdard compliant.

The more recent versions of Celestia use more recent OpenGL features. This causes problems when Celestia is used with older libraries, even those for Nvidia cards. For example, Celestia v1.2.4 work fine, although slowly, with the OpenGL v1.1 drivers supplied with Windows XP for Nvidia cards, but v1.2.5 crashes immediately. V1.2.5 works fine when Nvidia's OpenGL 1.4 libraries are installed on the same system, however.

As a result, those of us who have become addicted to Celestia have been forced to upgrade to Nvidia cards of various models.