2 Problems; Text, and Game Freeze

nednerb

Ok first problem, is when I run Natural Selection in D3D or OpenGL mode, the text is beyond readable, for finding servers, editing options etc. The image is cropped however that is exactly how I see the text in menus. Text In-Game is fine.

(Screenshot)
<a href="http://www.hardcorepwnography.com/ns/ns.jpg" target="_blank">http://www.hardcorepwnography.com/ns/ns.jpg</a>

Second problem and a major one at that.

Whenever I play NS it would randomly freeze and become unresponsive with music or sound effects constantly repeating. I have an ATI HD3850 with the latest catalyst drivers with "VPU recovery" active, the game will hard crash, with an error report asking me to send the information to ATI. With VPU recovery switched off the PC will go into Windows XP BSOD. Happens also with regular Half-Life even during Single Player mode. A temporary solution I have found is when I enable Windowed mode it never crashes. But I would prefer to play in Full Screen.

Also I can play CS: Source and DOD: Source perfectly fine. It is just Half-Life and I imagine all its mods.

Any help on both issues is appreciated.

Thanks
- nednerb

DarkFrost

<a href="http://supportwiki.steampowered.com/wiki/Steam_Problem:_Missing_or_scrambled_text_in_Steam_menus" target="_blank">http://supportwiki.steampowered.com/wiki/S..._in_Steam_menus</a>

Might hold the solution to your first problem.

For your second, you could try installing the drivers that came with the card. Appart from that, I dunno, I've never through, 6 generations of ATI cards, had vpu recover do anything remotely useful and have it switched off.

TinCan

For the ATI card, I had a similar problem where the game would freeze for three or four seconds (and sometimes lock up) - I solved it by disabling the ATI Hot Key POLLER service.

Also, I recommend using the Omega drivers instead <a href="http://www.omegadrivers.net/" target="_blank">http://www.omegadrivers.net/</a>

Thansal

what tincan said.

However for the font thing:
What type of monitor do you have? Mainly, what aspect ratio is it? It looks like you are trying to use a resolution in HL that doesn't mesh with your monitor's aspect ration. Poke around there.

nednerb

Tried reinstalling fonts, no good, for first problem, tried the ATI Hot Key Poller and still experience the hard crashes.
My resolution is 1920x1080, the monitor and graphics card supports the resolution.

I'm going to format my PC in a couple of days hopefully the issues will be cleared up off a fresh install but if not I'm ###### ><

Underwhelmed

BSODs are usually a driver/hardware conflict thing. This probably has less to do with NS than it does your system configuration. Search around to see if other people with your video card are having the same problem.
Omega drivers haven't been updated in over a year - if you're looking for a 3rd party alternative, Do Not Argue is your best bet.

resresres

I have the exact same problem.
WinXP, DX9+, ATI 4870 1GB x1
I got it running for about 5 to 10 mins (in low res and window mode) but all the graphics
were in turbo mode, super fast with a few freeze ups, then froze and crashed near the end of my playtest.

Latest drivers, Everything up to date.
Had a Nvidia 8500GT before, and that ran fine (100+fps, 32bit, 1024x w/e)



This makes me a sad panda.

Every other game (albeit newer games) run perfectly fine. Even Starcraft and diablo2 run w/o issues.

gyMe

I'm not sure about the crashing, but I know what you mean about the text. It was something messed up in the 6.6 drivers or something, the latest 6.7 leaked drivers don't have that problem. Kind of irritating I know, especially being required to use beta drivers that were basically leaked in order to fix a problem that should exist in the first place but whatever. I would post a link but I'm not sure of the policy on the forums having to do with this sort of thing, if you can't find it via google shoot me a message.