NHL2008 no menus

I spent 3 hours last night trying to get NHL 2008 to run on my MacPro
notebook under Bootcamp with XP Pro, including reinstalling 3 times on
different disks. The problem was that the menus didn't appear and the
game appeared frozen with the screen where the first set of menus
normally appear - but the music was on. I found the solution on the EA
forums, but couldn't find out how to implement it, so I post it here for
other potentially frustrated gamers.

The problem (which apparently existed with previous versions of NHL) is
caused by the Vsync. If you don't understand what that means, welcome
to the club (but I know now). It has to do with the game trying to
display frame rates faster than the computer can.

The solution on the forum is to turn Vsync on, but there is no such box
on my computer . The solution is in the advanced window under the 3D
tab where Direct 3D appears along with other stuff. There is a slider
for performance vs quality; if you push it far enough towards quality,
you will see that it forces vertical synchonization on - that is what
you want.

After that, I played for a couple of hours without any problems.

Strangely when I had earlier installed NHL2008 on my Quad Mac Pro at
work, I didn't have to go through with any of this - it worked on the
first installation - probably because this computer supports faster
frame rates. The video card on the laptop is a X1600 whereas on the quad
it is a X1900...Oh yes, the game also works well on my 2 GHz P4 PC with
a Radeon 8500 video card.

I am a bit peeved at EA for this: gamers should not have to change
complex video settings on their computers to play games, and especially
not have to spend hours searching the internet for solutions. I have
plenty of other PC games on my Mac laptop like MTW2, Civ 4, WoW,
Warcraft III, Flight Simulator X, etc, and none of them required me to
do anything like this.

Henri

On Oct 30, 9:51 am, Henri Arsenault <ars....RemoveThis@nospamforme.ulaval.ca>
wrote:
> I spent 3 hours last night trying to get NHL 2008 to run on my MacPro
> notebook under Bootcamp with XP Pro, including reinstalling 3 times on
> different disks. The problem was that the menus didn't appear and the
> game appeared frozen with the screen where the first set of menus
> normally appear - but the music was on. I found the solution on the EA
> forums, but couldn't find out how to implement it, so I post it here for
> other potentially frustrated gamers.
>
> The problem (which apparently existed with previous versions of NHL) is
> caused by the Vsync. If you don't understand what that means, welcome
> to the club (but I know now). It has to do with the game trying to
> display frame rates faster than the computer can.
>
> The solution on the forum is to turn Vsync on, but there is no such box
> on my computer . The solution is in the advanced window under the 3D
> tab where Direct 3D appears along with other stuff. There is a slider
> for performance vs quality; if you push it far enough towards quality,
> you will see that it forces vertical synchonization on - that is what
> you want.
>
> After that, I played for a couple of hours without any problems.
>
> Strangely when I had earlier installed NHL2008 on my Quad Mac Pro at
> work, I didn't have to go through with any of this - it worked on the
> first installation - probably because this computer supports faster
> frame rates. The video card on the laptop is a X1600 whereas on the quad
> it is a X1900...Oh yes, the game also works well on my 2 GHz P4 PC with
> a Radeon 8500 video card.
>
> I am a bit peeved at EA for this: gamers should not have to change
> complex video settings on their computers to play games, and especially
> not have to spend hours searching the internet for solutions. I have
> plenty of other PC games on my Mac laptop like MTW2, Civ 4, WoW,
> Warcraft III, Flight Simulator X, etc, and none of them required me to
> do anything like this.
>
> Henri

And it has nothing to do with playing the game on an emulator?