[Tech] Gemini Rue and Windows 7 64Bit

[Nathan Allen Pinar]

For the record, the symptoms I experienced were that the game would start fine, and I'd hear the rain from the main menu, but the image would be frozen on the loading screen. Only by moving the mouse back and forth sections of the screen would update to the current frame and then freeze again. Very weird. But I think it was because GR was running under my Intel HD GPU, and not my Nvidia GPU (I have two GPU's that switch dynamically, but for the life of me I can't get GR to use the Nvidia card).

Make sure your laptop (or in some cases...computer) is not set on power saving mode. It needs to be high performance as your nVidia card needs all that juice. This happens on my Dell XPS as well.

EDIT: Oh wait..that was answered already. Well..someone may skip to page 2 looking for this solution.

A FAQ might be a good idea.

[Shade]

I had a bunch of problems running GR on my Vista 7 64-bit desktop (ATI video)... Solved them by running the game in Compatibility Mode and selecting "Disable visual themes" (probably enough) and "Disable desktop composition". After that everything worked! I'm now running the game full screen with no problems.

[DaveGilbert]

Thanks, Shade!  Hedgefield, let us know if this works.  It would be good to know for others who have this problem.

[CheekyBoinc]

A thread at the top with "FAQ" would be good

[hedgefield]

Nope that doesn't change a thing on my machine, neither with compatiblity or any variety of those other options in that tab, nor with high performance. Only thing that works so far is 16bit.

[ADDENDUM]
I've made a highly, highly peculiar discovery. So we know in windowed mode the image freezes (unless the window is dragged around), yes? Well what I've just found is that if I drag and drop the window down so that the bottom of it falls BENEATH MY TASKBAR, everything magically works!

I've seen some weird computer hooey in my time, but this just takes the cake...

[PXAbstraction]

Hey all. I found out about Gemini Rue from Giant Bomb's recent quick look video and was quite intrigued. I grabbed the demo and am having a similar issue to everyone else in this thread. I am running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and when I run the game, I can hear the rain sound playing but it sits at a black screen till I close it with ALT-F4. Sometimes I see the borders of the window but get the same behaviour. This laptop is an HP ProBook 6555b which has an AMD Phenom II 2.8Ghz processor and embedded ATI Radeon HD4250 graphics which aren't powerful but can run Civ V on low detail. I've tried several of the suggestions put forth here to resolve the issue and nothing seems to be working. This game really interests me and I want to pick it up but it will be played on this laptop so I've got to make sure the demo works first. Does anyone have any other potential ideas? Thanks!

[DaveGilbert]

Stupid question, but since this thread is a bit long you might have missed this solution.  Did you try the battery mode suggestion?  95% of the people who have this problem get it solved that way.

[PXAbstraction]

I did try that. HP has their own power management utility on this laptop but I manually went into the Windows power profile and checked. By default, it was set to run at a maximum of 100% CPU power when plugged in but it could also throttle is back to as low as 5% when it wasn't busy. I manually changed this to run at 100% all the time but it hasn't helped any.

[PXAbstraction]

So really weird thing. I saw Wadjet Eye's post on the Giant Bomb forums where they offered a discount code to buy the full game. I still never got the demo working on my laptop but decided to buy the game anyway as I wanted to support it and I figured one day, I would either find time to play it on my desktop at home or possibly on my girlfriend's laptop. For kicks, I decided to install the full version on my laptop, which is still in the exact same setup that the demo didn't work under. To my shock, it works fine! I have no idea what difference there is between the demo and full versions of the game but yeah, the full one works like a charm on this laptop now. Very happy I decided to pull the trigger on the purchase.

[DaveGilbert]

Hah!  Very interesting story.  Is there any differences on the winsetup.exe settings between the demo/full versions? 

[PXAbstraction]

Not from what I can tell. It is possible I changed something recently that's made the game work but I know I haven't updated the video drivers, nor changed any settings. Very weird. One of those unexplainable things I guess.

[DaveGilbert]

Well, as long as it works, everybody's happy.

[dannyCage]

Hi, I'm planing to purchase, but also experience the problem with freeze as mentioned above, and running in window-mode and having the bottom part in the task bar solves the freeze, but I would like to play the game in full-screen.

My setup is,
Windows 7 x64bit
Lenovo T420s, Core i7 2.7ghz, 4gb Ram 160SSD

Anyone solved this?

[DaveGilbert]

Hi DannyCage.  Did you try the battery settings solution mentioned on the first page (probably a dumb question, but you didn't specify so I figured I'd ask...)?  Did you make any changes to the winsetup.exe file?

I had the same difficulty on my Win 7 asus laptop, and I spent two hours on the phone with the most patient tech support guy in the world.  It seems that the main cause of these problems are twofold: The game is 16 bit (which Windows 7 doesn't like) and the game uses DirectDraw to display its graphics (which Windows 7 also doesn't like).  Typically, sorting out how to display DirectDraw graphics on your computer solves both problems. 

From what I understand, futzing with the battery or performance settings can fix the problem (on my computer, changing the default settings to "High Performance mode" did the trick). By default, some Win 7 laptops are shipped with a performance setting that doesn't give enough power to the graphics card to display DirectDraw.  For most games this it isn't a problem, since DirectDraw is hardly ever used these days.  Unfortunately, the AGS engine (and by extension Gemini Rue) is one of those rare exceptions.

Hope this helps!

-Dave

[RedJimi]

I'm having this problem also in my HP Pavilion g6-1113eo (win7, 64bit).
The game starts with jamming loading screen. alt-tab switching back and forth shows me the rainy main menu for 2 frames. I've paid few euros for worse games so I don't really mind
I'm running the game through Steam and have no idea where it is installed.
I tried changing to a full power battery profile, but it seems senseless that a bare screen brightness-setting could affect a game this deeply.
Now, if the game has a problem with DirectX (my version is up to date, v.11), then the dxdiag.exe should tell something relevant towards solving this problem, right? My graphics come from an integrated Intel-i5 that is "Intel(R) HD Graphics Family" with 1696 MB of Display Memory (Dedicated Memory: 64 MB + Shared Memory: 1632 MB).
I also tried to setting the colordepth to 16-bit to no avail.
I'm open to suggestions on what to test next. Or maybe the game will get a worthy update.