Sam & Max resolution switching problem, can't start game

gnugnug

Hello there,

Sam & Max Episode 1 had been running fine in 800x600 mode on my laptop. I had to go and tempt fate by changing to 1600x1200. The screen went black though the sound continued. I had to quit with Alt-F4 since I couldn't see where to click.

Now whenever I try to launch Episode 1, the same thing happens: screen flashes white, then goes straight to black with ambient sounds, and I have to quit with Alt-F4.

Any ideas? Is there a way to change the resolution outside the game? Seasons 2 and 3 run fine; I've never tampered with their resolution. Uninstalling and reinstalling the game didn't help, nor did deleting the prefs.prop file.

I'm using a GeForce 8400M GS (natively 1920x1200) with the latest drivers and everything seems well within requirements. I'm bummed because I just paid my $20 and now this. Thanks for any help

demonfoo

Maybe try removing the 'prefs.prop' file from the game install directory (normally "C:\Program Files\Telltale Games\Sam and Max - Season One\[game specific dir]"); this will throw out a few other settings as well, but should get you back into a place where you can choose a resolution that'll work for you instead of being completely blind.

gnugnug

Thanks, unfortunately I did already try deleting that file (see above), and even tried using Season 2's prefs.prop file, but there was no change in behavior.

Oddly, I tried deleting the prefs.prop from all three seasons, and I was able to switch resolutions within Season 2 (1024x768 works) and it remembered that setting when I launched again, so the resolution settings must be stored somewhere else. The prefs.prop files were not recreated.

Maybe this has something to do with my getting the game from Yahoo! Games rather than Telltale directly.

gnugnug

I seem to have found a workaround. If I launch the game in windowed mode, I can make it to the Options screen where I can set a full-screen resolution that doesn't blackout my display. Pity that I can't get the higher resolution to work but this is better than nothing.

Molokov

gnugnug - you can always use alt-enter to switch between full screen and windowed mode during the game. If you can't set the full-screen resolution to be the same as your actual screen, could be a "weak" graphics card or DirectX problem. I'm sure the TTG guys might have a better idea.

gnugnug

Thanks for telling me about alt-enter, Molokov, that enabled me to fix episode 201 when I blacked out my screen trying to go to 1900x1200 resolution. 1440x900 is the highest it will go for some reason. I'm running Vista with DirectX 10 so I'm guessing "weak" graphic card is the likeliest scenario.

Molokov

As Will and Seg and others have said in other threads, the TTG games need DirectX 9.0c - DirectX 10 is a completely different beasty. You can have them both installed at the same time.

(IIRC, there's very few video cards yet that have good DirectX 10 support, but most on the market play well with DirectX 9)

Seg

To be clear, think of DirectX as a gear shift. Our game works on the '9.0c' gear, regardless of OS. The ability of DirectX 10, regardless if the graphics card can do it or not, is irrelevant to a Telltale game.

To put it another way:
XP has the '8' and '9' gears, where as Vista has '8', '9', and adds the '10th' gear. Since our game requests the '9.0c' gear, we could care less about the ability of 10.