Text Issues

I'm having the exact same issue on Windows XP SP2. I've got a GeForce 8800 GTS 640mb with the latest drivers. I've also tried reinstalling and everything else thats been mentions to no avail.

 

It must be the 8800's drivers?

 

Yeah, thats what I'm thinking at this point. If that's the case, I'm not sure what to do short of using another computer to play.

 

Have you tried lowering hardware acceleration for your graphics card? It MIGHT work as it (at least to my knowledge) disables some of the fancy new features of the powerful hardware.

 

Just gave that a try, seems to make the text look even worse the lower I notch the setting.

 

Does your motherboard have it's own built in graphics card?
Maybe you could just plug your monitor in and play from there.

 

Alright I had a chance to try Cave Story on a Vista computer.
I haven't found a good solution. The game is completely playable, but the text doesn't seem to clear itself. Now there is a Workaround that is annoying, but until a better solution is found this is what works I guess.

Here's my first solution:
Run Cave Story in full screen with at least one other thing open?, and alt tab each time it makes a mess.
For each time you switch, it forces a complete redraw of the screen or something. Resulting in the proper formatting. And a moment of legiable text, until something else overwrites itself.
A trick to speeding this up and not killing your monitor with resolution switching is matching your desktop resolution with cavestory... right click on desktop -> personalize -> Monitor -> advanced settings -> List All Modes -> and choose the resolution that you use in Cave Story [640x480 and probably the lower refresh rate]

I was trying to find a program to clear or refresh automatically without alt-tabbing but so far I haven't found one.

 

Should we contact Pixel and ask if he'd be willing to look into this issue?
I had no problems whatsover running the game on Vista Home Premium, though. The game ran maybe a little little little bit slower, but it didn't affect the gameplay. The sound was 100% perfect without any distortion or other evil sounds. I re-installed WinXP and now for the first time ever I have to lower the sound acceleration to Minimum to get the music to sound right. Strange, huh?

 

It is indeed a strange issue. CS runs perfectly on a P3 system with 8 megs of video memory, and 128 megs of ram I picked up the other day from a junk sale. Now I can enjoy CS again; although, it is somewhat annoying that my high end main system can't properly play one of my favorite games.

 

Cave Story works fine on Vista - it appears to just be nVIDIA cards, since my ATI Radeon works with CS fine, otherwise I wouldn't be able to make comics.

 

Considering I've been spending the past week trying to fix computer problems that turned out to be nVidia's "drivers", I can say the issue is likely a problem with nVidia cards/drivers.

The best fix is to probably contact Pixel and see what he can do (if anything) but otherwise the only fix is to use another video card, or maybe try uninstalling the nVidia drivers and using the generic Windows ones.

 

It might also just be a matter of time till it works on Vista if we're lucky..! I checked the Nvidia drivers and compared the XP ones to Vista's and currently there's a huge list of features available for XP that are still under construction for Vista.
http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/158.24/158.24_ForceWare_Release_Notes.pdf

Nvidia's Vista drivers don't support much yet. But, I think in the coming months hopefully when they start getting everything working, Cave Story will be running flawlessly again...! Maybe...

 

I sure hope so...

 

If you want to try something immediately and have Vista Ultimate edition :
How To Run Windows XP Inside Vista With Virtual PC
It's free as long as you have a copy of XP ..! I haven't tried it personally but I imagine it would run Cave Story without having to dual boot~

 

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) I'm running XP SP2 (and Slackware 11, but thats another story). So, yeah, it looks like a driver issue and not an OS related one.

 

W00t, with the new beta drivers, the text works fine!

 

sweeeeeeet
If that's the case, looks like we get a happy ending after all...!