I had a fair amount of trouble with my first installation of Windows XP with respect to gaming. You can read the initial story here if you're interested, as well as the details of what ultimately fixed my problems. For those who would prefer to cut right to the chase, however, I suggest you try the following links instead.
Arx Fatalis
Battlefield 1942
Battlefield 2
Clive Barker's Undying
Command & Conquer: Generals
DOOM 3
Dungeon Keeper II
Halo
Raven Shield
Sacrifice
Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
Tribes 2
Arx Fatalis has one rather annoying problem with GeForce video cards of the 6x00 (and later) series: an uncomfortable number of the textures in the game are missing, leaving the objects to which they're applied as ugly white blobs. You can read about the problem and its solution in this forum thread or from the nvnews forums. The short version of the problem is that the game checks for a limited texture capability in older (read pre-6x00 series) cards; if it fails to find it, well, you get no textures. That doesn't strike me as particularly bright. I also find it silly that NVIDIA can't fix the problem, insofar as ATI's cards work just fine. Whatever the case, visit those threads if you need the fix.
Battlefield 1942 (BF1942) is the mother of all problem games in my experience. The original shipping version positively wouldn't work for beans with any Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! sound card. It also had numerous problems with other sound cards, several video cards, and more network latency bugs in the code than you could shake a stick at. The patches have fixed many of these problems, so the first thing to do if you're having trouble with BF1942 under Windows XP is to make sure you've applied the latest patch. It will likely save you many headaches.
There remain several problems not yet fixed by the v1.3 patch, however, and I've found solutions for some of them. First, there remain several problems with the audio, particularly if you're the owner of a Creative Labs Audigy 2 sound card. Unfortunately, the v1.3 patch finally made the game largely compatible with the Creative Labs SB Live! sound card, but it did so at the cost of screwing up the game for Audigy 2 users. Naturally, I had upgraded from an SB Live! to an Audigy 2, so I've personally been screwed with both cards (sigh). At any rate, the sound problems come in three general flavors.
First, there are the "echo" or "stuttering" problems. If you fire an assault rifle, for example, and the sound of gunfire echoes—or keeps playing without stopping at all—you've got this problem. To date, there is no clear solution for it. Some users have reported that the latest driver update from Creative Labs fixes this problem; for others, the problem seems to remain despite the update. Other "solutions" that have been reported include (1) moving your sound card to a different PCI slot, (2) adjusting your PCI latency settings in the BIOS, (3) enabling (or disabling) hardware acceleration in the sound options, (4) setting the quality of the sound to 22 KHz., and a host of other still-more-obscure remedies. I'm sorry, but if you've got this problem, you might not be able to solve it just yet. It might have to wait for further patches.
Second, there is the I-can't-hear-what's-right-in-front-of-me problem. If you throw a grenade directly in front of you and it makes no sound at all, you've got this problem. This seems to be some kind of issue with the way BF1942 handles different speaker configurations. I have a 5.1 speaker system (i.e., four regular satellite speakers plus a center channel and a sub-woofer), and I get this problem if I leave my speaker configuration set to 5.1 (silly me, eh?). If I change my speaker configuration (using either the AudioHQ utility from Creative Labs or the advanced sound properties in Windows XP) to 4.1 instead, then the problem is solved. The positional audio in BF1942 is absolutely stupendous when it's working, so you should definitely try to make use of it.
Third, there are the "hitching" problems. These come in several varieties, but they all have a common symptom, namely, that the game seems to freeze up briefly from time to time or play in a "jerky" fashion. This is particularly noticeable on my system when flying a plane and performing very tight turns. In my case, I came to suspect the hitching was due to the game playing a certain "groaning" or "rasping" sound during such tight maneuvers, presumably to suggest the control surfaces fighting against the various forces that would stress a real aircraft.
I've had pretty bad hitching problems with BF1942 ever since the v1.3 patch, but I've fixed almost all of them by manually setting the PCI latency for my video, audio, and network devices using PowerStrip. My video card sets itself up by default with a latency of 248, my network device sets itself up at 128, and my poor Audigy 2 card is set at a measly 32. After adjusting the video card down to 80, the network device to 32, and the Audigy 2 to 64, I no longer get most of the hitching problems! It seems that with the video and network devices unable to hog the PCI bus so much, my sound card has a chance to work too. Imagine that. This is cleared up so many other issues that I've written a separate article about this whole business.
| NB: | PCI latency values must be specified in multiples of 8. Further, specifying bad values (e.g., zero) can bring your system to its knees. Be sure to tweak PCI latency values only if you know what you're doing! |
Ladies and gentlemen take my advice: pull down your pants and slide on the ice. Old M*A*S*H reference aside, Battlefield 2 (BF2) is the new king of the hill for all-time buggy, problematic games. I first blogged about the game back in late June, and I have quite literally been fighting it on and off since that time. Along the way I've thought I had my issues with it licked on several occasions, but today (09/22/05) I'm reasonably confident that I have truly exorcised that beast's demons on my computer, and I'm writing it all down while I still have all my notes intact. The following is the long litany of tweaks, tips, and tricks that have helped various people in no particular order.
If your video card has an AGP interface, then be sure to set the AGP aperture properly in your system BIOS. A good value is at least the size of your card's memory. If you have a card with 128 MB of memory, for example, then you should either use an aperture setting of 128 MB or 256 MB; anything lower would surely slow you down, but anything higher likely won't help.
For additional help, I can recommend a couple of different links. First, there's this very helpful post over on the Planet Battlefield forums. Though it didn't ultimately fix my problems, it did give me some good suggestions for finding them, most notably fixing the single-player game first. I can also recommend this TweakGuides.com article, which may be of great help in optimizing your system.
There are a couple of common problems with Clive Barker's Undying under Windows XP. The first is a problem with the audio. To be more specific, some systems have distorted audio when playing under Windows XP, and this is particularly common with the Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! sound card. You have several options for fixing or working around this problem, and they are as follows.
A second common problem with the game is that it will simply refuse to run. Upon launching, the CD-ROM drive will spin for a minute, and sometimes the game's opening screen will appear, but then after a few seconds nothing else will happen. This is entirely the fault of the copy protection mechanism used by the game developers.
To be more specific, you can blame SafeDisc for this problem. The only fix of which I'm aware is to crack the game. The procedure varies from game to game, but it's really pretty simple for Undying. All you need to do is track down a copy of the Unsafedisc tool on the web. I'm sorry, but for liability reasons I do not and will not make this available to anyone who asks. If you need it, search for it. It's pretty easy to find.
Once you've found it, go ahead and use it to create an "unwrapped" version of the executable. Note well: if the Unsafedisc tool crashes when you run it, try running it under Windows 9x instead. I couldn't get it to work under Windows XP at all, but under Windows 98 it unwrapped the game in a few seconds. Once you've gotten the copy protection code out of the way, you'll actually find that the game starts and loads much more quickly. You can even play without the CD!
Command & Conquer: Generals (C&C:G) is a good game, but it has some bugs, even after a couple of patches have been released by the developer. I have managed to find work-arounds for the three major problems I've had with the game, and I'm betting that others might find them useful as well. Having said that, read on!
First, some of the in-game "movies"—I typically refer to such things as in-game cut-scenes, but they're so good in C&C:G that they really do merit the term 'movie'—stutter or play back in a jerky fashion. It's not a fun-killing problem, or anything like that, but it does kind of trash the magic when missiles just fired from a plane hang still in mid-air while the "whooshing" sound loops in the background. The fix for this is to add the "+b" switch to the command-line used when launching the game. I don't know what it does or why it works, but it has made playback of all of the in-game movies completely smooth on my system. Incidentally, you can avoid the EA Games logo (and the opening movie as well) by adding the "-nologo" switch while you're at it.
Second, upon winning the final missions in the campaigns, there is an in-game movie followed by a pre-rendered movie. On my system, the most bizarre thing was happening at the end of the China campaign. To be more specific, after I destroyed the last GLA building, the letterbox format would impose itself over the action and the in-game movie played back. But a few seconds after the "You Are Victorious!" banner appeared on the screen, the audio and video stopped completely; i.e., the screen went completely black and the audio went silent. After exactly two minutes—don't ask me why—the pre-rendered movie played back. I don't know why this problem occurs, but I do know how to solve it: defragment your drive. In my own case, I had to run my defrag software a couple of times to get all the big files defragmented, but that fixed the problem. The movies now play as they should, back to back, without the two-minute wait at a black screen. Weird, eh?
Third, and most bizarre of all, whenever the game would crash, my house server would stop sharing files. Yes, you read that right. Whenever the game crashed on my desktop machine, the file server in our house would stop sharing files. I could still connect to it by other means, mind you, but it would not share any files or allow you to browse its resources. The fix turned out to be pretty simple, namely, to move my "My Documents" folder off that server and onto one of my local drives. In the past, you see, my "My Documents" folder has always been the root of my H: drive, which is a network drive mapped to my home directory on our server. That way, the server can automatically back-up all of my important data without my machine needing to be available or even powered up. C&C:G stores your user data under the "My Documents" folder, however, and when it crashes, it apparently screws up file sharing somehow in a big way. The solution is to get C&C:G off a networked drive. Granted, I have to make sure that my local files get copied to the server, but I can take care of that with a simple batch file.
The most common problem with DOOM 3 (D3) is, as I find myself writing more and more frequently, due to the crappy copy protection garbage it employs, namely, Safedisc 3. You see, the makers of Safedisc 3 know better than you do what software you should use. Worse, and far more arrogant, they figure they have a right to prevent you from using products you've legally purchased if they find any software on your machine that they don't like! Personally, I would really like to express my thoughts on the subject to them in person. Perhaps a nice meat-hook enema would do the trick, though it wouldn't quite convey the depth of my feelings on the subject.
At any rate, if D3 refuses to run because it detects emulation software, and you have CloneCD, GameDrive, or any other software on your computer that is used either for copying CDs or providing virtual CD drives, you should try disabling or uninstalling it. In my particular case, it's always CloneCD that triggers the problem. And I have to uninstall it completely to fix it; simply disabling it doesn't do the trick. Some people report that unchecking the "Hide CD-R Media" option will make D3 work with CloneCD, but it doesn't solve my problem. I'm not sure for what Safedisc 3 searches, but if I've got CloneCD installed anywhere on my drives it will find it and complain.
Incidentally, in case the jackasses responsible for such an outrageous violation of users' rights ever read this paragraph, I use CloneCD for two purposes: (1) to make backups of my legally purchased game CDs so that I don't wear them out during regular play, and (2) to bring scratched music CDs back to life. I don't know why CloneCD works for that second purpose, but whenever one of my legally purchased music CDs stops working from damage CloneCD can usually make a copy that works. It seems weird to me, but CloneCD is a lifesaver in that regard. Oh, and you can take your crappy copy protection garbage and shove it!
Dungeon Keeper II (DK2) is a fabulous game, but I had a really tough time getting it to work under Windows XP. I will provide the variety of tips and tricks that I collected while trying to make it work. The odds are good that you're here because you're seeing one of three things: (1) the game won't run at all, (2) the game runs but crashes back to the desktop, or (3) the game runs but the audio cracks, pops, and features various other annoying artifacts. I'll address each one of these separately, for they are typically caused by different things. Before trying anything, though, make sure you've patched the game to the latest version (v1.7). The latest version is far less buggy than the original.
This is the worst case scenario (naturally), and it was (also naturally) exactly the scenario I faced. In my case, I kept getting errors about how DKII.icd was crashing. Frankly, I hadn't a clue what DKII.icd was at the time, so that wasn't very helpful. I've since learned a fair amount, so bear with me while I explain.
DK2 is a game that uses the Safedisc variety of copy protection. Safedisc as a technology uses specially-written sectors on a CD to validate that it isn't a duplicate. In effect, the sectors are deliberately screwed up so that most everyday sorts of CD-copying utilities won't let Joe Gamer make duplicates and pass them around to his friends. The particular version of Safedisc used by DK2 is such that the DKII.exe file is nothing more than a utility that verifies the CD, then loads the real game (stored in DKII.icd) and runs it.
The problem with Safedisc (and other such copy-protection mechanisms) is that it can render the game unplayable depending upon what hardware your computer has in it. Some CD-ROM drives, and this is particularly true of the bargain-basement units, have more trouble reading those special sectors than others. This can result in Safedisc being unable to verify that you have a legitimate copy of the game, and this typically results in some kind of error message about how you need to put the CD in the drive, or something still more insulting. If you're getting that kind of error with the copy protection, then you really have but a few choices, which are as follows.
I have listed these in the order in which I typically try them, in order of increasing inconvenience, so try them as you think best. Alternately, if the game won't run at all because it's crashing at startup, then you have a different procedure in your future. The first thing to do is to try to figure out why it's crashing. DK2 has several command-line switches that can help you narrow down the problem. I suggest starting with the "-nosound" option as DK2 seems to be particularly fussy about audio cards. You can also try the "-nogamma" switch. If one of these lets you run the game, then you know that something is wrong with your sound or video respectively. In that case, try updating your drivers, or try the audio fixes listed below for those who are having trouble with the sound.
If those command-line switches don't help, though, then you may well be out of luck. In my own case, the ultimate solution required that I reinstall Windows XP completely. I never figured out what was wrong with my previous installation, and I have no idea what's different with my current installation. What I can tell you, though, is that a fresh installation of Windows XP ran DK2 just fine. I've been able to run it ever since without an issue. Go figure.
This is probably the most typical complaint I've heard. Sadly, the only thing I know to try to fix it is to use the "-nosound" command-line switch. If this fixes the problem, then you may have something wrong with your audio configuration. In that case, try updating your drivers, or try the audio fixes listed below for those who are having trouble with the sound. If that doesn't fix the problem, then about all you can do is try the various compatibility tweaks mentioned above, try different video resolutions, and so forth. At the end of the day, you might just be stuck with the crashing. If that's the case, well, then save early and save often.
This is also quite common, and in fact I still can't get the game to run perfectly. Even after reinstalling Windows XP, I get a variety of audio artifacts: popping, clicking, the narrator repeating himself, etc. One thing that seems to fix some of the problems is to update the QMIXER.DLL file. The game shipped with file version 4.1.0.0, but the latest version, at the time of this writing, is 5.0.0.0. Download the latest version of the QSound developers kit from the QSound web site and try the QMIXER.DLL that comes with it instead. That may not fix all your problems, but it may make the game more playable.
Another possible fix for the audio problems, which may also solve various crashing issues, is to turn down the audio hardware acceleration. To do this, go into the Control Panel's "Sounds and Audio Devices" applet, navigate to the "Audio" tab, click the "Advanced" button in the "Sound playback" section, go to the "Performance" page of the resulting property sheet, and try knocking the slider down a few notches. I've not seen this make any difference, but it's been reported to me as a useful tweak.
There are three common annoyances of which I'm aware when it comes to Halo, first among which being that it runs like crap. I'm sorry to say there isn't much to be done about this. The only thing I'm aware of that can make much of a difference is to hand edit the config.txt file in your game directory, but I don't have the details to be able to advise you on it with confidence. If you're a very competent sort of user—and do be honest with yourself about it—then search around the web for further information. It didn't make any difference on my system, but others swear by it.
Second, Halo looks like crap. Because it runs like a dog, even on bleeding edge systems, most gamers have to play at low resolutions (read: jaggies everywhere) to get anything approaching an acceptable frame rate. And I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but most users won't be able to make use of anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering either. The former is detected and disabled by the game with my NVIDIA video card and the latter causes nasty visual artifacts (e.g., a thin polygon stretching off the side of my gun to a wall miles away no matter where I go or what I do). You can try fiddling with resolutions and/or driver settings, but the bottom line is that the game is probably going to look like crap on your system compared to newer, more capable titles.
Third, the opening movies get really old really fast. For this, at least, I have a fix. Simply rename the bungie.bik, gearbox.bik, and mgs.bik files in your game directory to something else. If the game engine can't find them at startup it won't play them, which makes loading much faster.
Raven Shield (RS) is truly the king of all problematic games. Out of the box, it is simply unplayable for too many users. The framerates are so awful—irrespective of the resolution, color depth, detail settings, and so forth—that the game literally cannot be played. On my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (which is only the fastest consumer-level video card in existence at the time of this writing) it's not a game, it's a slide show. Worse, the mouse either lags or moves in a very jerky fashion, the multi-player server browser crashes, and if you're lucky enough to avoid those problems, you'll likely fail to get connected to a server because of problems with your CD key. In short, RS shipped horribly broken in many respects.
Fortunately, there are workarounds for some of these issues. First, regarding the frame rate issues, if you're using an ATI video card and you're getting a really crappy frame rate, try turning down the texture quality settings on the Direct3D options page of the display driver's advanced settings. I've found that by forcing Truform™ technology off, setting wait for vertical sync off, and dropping the texture and mipmap quality a notch or two, the single-player game can be made somewhat playable. You should also try using the lowest possible refresh rate for the resolution at which you run the game. I find that by running at 1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz. I get much better framerates than when running at 1280 x 1024 @ 100 Hz. Finally, you might also want to try some of the suggestions in Ping Whore's tweaking guide. In my experience they make no difference, but maybe you'll have better success with them than I did.
I've also found a bizarre tweak that helps my minimum framerate. The scene that I've been using to benchmark RS is from the second mission of the single-player campaign, operation "Cold Dagger". In that mission, if my team of operatives head to the right of where they spawn, toward the wood pile and a good sniping position on the side window of one of the houses, my framerate used to drop all the way down to 1 - 2 FPS as I approached the wood pile. Since applying the tweak, it drops no lower than about 10 FPS. That's obviously still not how the game should be working, but it's a big improvement. The tweak is to manually set the amount of L2 cache your CPU has available. In my case, my Athlon 2400 has 256 KB of L2 cache. When I configured Windows XP with that value, I was surprised to see the improvement. Incidentally, it also boosts my system's benchmark scores by about 50 3D Marks (3DMark 2003), and about 5 - 6 FPS using the Quake III Arena demo001. For those who aren't registry mavens, I suggest you download a copy of Fresh UI and use it to apply the tweak for you. For those who want to understand more about the L2 cache, I suggest doing some reading at Ars Technica.
Second, if you're having problems with your mouse, I have two suggestions. First, make sure you have the latest drivers. In my case, installing the official, recently-released drivers for my Boomslang 2000 mouse under Windows XP made a noticeable difference. I didn't previously have much of a choice, really, insofar as the manufacturer has just now provided Windows XP drivers (after vainly promising them for nearly a year), but they do make a difference. Second, open up the RavenShield.ini file in the System folder of your RS installation. Look for the section named "[D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]" and look for the line within it that reads "ReduceMouseLag=False". Change that 'False' to 'True', and it should take care of the problem. Note well: you'll lose a handful of frames per second, but the additional precision and control will likely be worth it.
Third, if the server browser crashes every time it refreshes, which it naturally did for me given my luck, open the properties of the shortcut that you use to launch the game. Go to the target field and add the "-norunaway" command-line switch after the executable file name. Don't ask me why the developers thought this command-line switch shouldn't be enabled by default, given that the alternative is that the server browser crashes every time it refreshes. There are lots of things I don't understand about why RS shipped in the shape that it did, and I have few answers.
Fourth, if you're getting the "invalid CD key" message, the "can't connect to server" message, or other messages saying things to the effect that you can't join a multi-player game, then I'm sorry to inform you that you're screwed, plain and simple. Some people have reported that completely uninstalling the game, creating a fresh installation of Windows XP, and reinstalling the game takes care of the problem. Me, I'm not willing to go that far to play the game. To the best of my knowledge, there is no clear workaround or fix for the multi-player problems. Your only ray of hope is that the developers have claimed they will fix these problems in the first patch, which is said to be due any day now (for sake of reference, it's 04/04/2003 as I write this).
As an aside, aren't you glad that the developers used that dumb-ass CD key copy-protection crap? Aren't you glad that you get to suffer because they're too lazy or too stupid to come up with a better system to prevent fraud? I know I sure sleep better at night knowing they're screwing their customer base. Such inane measures never stop hackers, which is clear in this case because I've already seen the game available for download along with CD keys and a generator. And no, don't bother to ask me where; I'm not going to help shiftless jerks break the law in their freeloading. So what's the result of such copy protection? I'll tell you: it accomplishes precisely dick to prevent piracy while simultaneously screwing the legitimate, paying customers. Here's a simple suggestion for developers: wake the hell up and stop using it! I'm sorry if I sound a little bitter, but I'm more than a little annoyed that I (and other gamers) keep getting shafted by such pointless garbage for no good reason.
Fifth, since writing the above four I've come up with some more tweaks for the problems with framerates and high-end ATI video cards. One thing to try is disabling FastWrite, both on the "SMARTGART™" page of your advanced video settings and in your system's BIOS. On my box, that did a lot to stop the frame rate plunging during combat, which made the game much more playable. Also, for those who are truly hard core, you should check to see what BIOS version your video card has. The two available at the time of this writing are v8.003 and v8.004. Some persons have seen big performance increases after updating their card to the v8.004 BIOS. To check what version your card has, go to the "Options" page of your advanced video settings and click the "Details" button; the resulting dialog will list that and other interesting stuff. The flash utility and various BIOS images can be found at Omegadrive's Little Corner web site. Note well, however, that flashing your BIOS will void your warranty with ATI, and it can render your video card unusuable without a new chip if any problems occur. Take such a step only as a measure of very last resort, and only if you're a technically competent user. I will not help anyone flash their BIOS, because if you have to ask how it's done, you shouldn't try it.
| NB: | Since updating my motherboard from a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP to a Gigabyte 7N-400 Pro, I haven't had any of the awful framerate chugging problems that I had before. Yes, the framerate is still lower than it probably should be, but the game is far more playable with my new motherboard. I don't know if that's due to the nForce2 chipset or not, but it might be. Take this for what it's worth! |
Sixth, I've run into another CD key issue. During the recent E3 - 2004 show, my friends and I tried to put together a LAN party at my house. I say 'tried' because we couldn't get the game to work properly. More to the point, any one computer could connect to a given server but as soon as a second machine tried to connect it would get the infamous "Your CD Key Is Already In Use!" error message. Note well: all of the relevant machines had legitimate copies of the software we were trying to use, as well as unique CD keys. That is, we weren't hacking, used warez copies of the game, etc. We don't do that sort of thing.
Some investigation brought the "How can I connect more than one computer on my LAN to play on the Internet?" article at the Ubi Soft Support Center to my attention. That article fixed the problem for Raven Shield (RS), but didn't fix it for Athena Sword (AS) at all. No matter what we did, we simply could not get AS to allow more than one computer to get past the CD key authorization code. To make a long story short, the "solution" was to delete the RavenShield.ini and GSRouters.dat files from my RavenShield\System folder. I don't know why that fixed the problem, but once I deleted those two files I was able to tweak the m_iRSCDKeyPort and m_iModCDKeyPort values and connect more than one computer when playing AS. Incidentally, this also greatly improved my framerate on AS maps, which was plunging into the teens in a number of places. Go figure. I guess RS/AS is a bit like Windows; i.e., it gets worse over time and requires re-configuration every so many months to stay "fresh".
Sacrifice is a pretty touchy game. I've had a couple of different problems with it, but I've managed to work past them all. First and foremost, you simply must have the latest and greatest versions of your video and audio drivers. That will solve about 75% of the problems in my experience. More often than not, problems with this game are related to some stupid driver issue.
The other sort of problem that Sacrifice seems to have—and far more often than other games, it seems—is compatibility trouble with other applications running in the background. With Hypersnap-DX v4.2 running, for example, the game will frequently and quite predictably crash back to the desktop. If you examine the error log, it's because a crash is occurring in the DXSNAP.DLL module.
| NB: | The latest version of Hypersnap-DX (v5.03 at the time of this writing) doesn't have any such crashing problems. |
I thought these kinds of problems were supposed to go the way of the dodo with Windows XP, but I guess not. The short version of the story is that if you're getting inexplicable crashes, and you've already updated all your drivers, then you should probably try running the game without anything else in the background. You might be having some nasty conflict with another application. Checking the log of the crash can help you figure out which application it might be.
This game has one terribly annoying default that simply must be changed: the apostrophe/single-quote key activates the console, which makes it almost completely impossible to type anything in the chat window. To change this, open the Default.ini file in the Online\System folder and change the line that reads "ConsoleKey=222" to something else. Using "ConsoleKey=192" will remap it to the tilde, which is by far the more sensible choice.
Tribes 2 (T2) seems to have several problems running under Windows XP. First and foremost, it crashes back to the desktop with unhandled exception (UE) errors on many systems. The best workaround I've found for this is to delete all the *.dso files under the T2 directory. This can be done manually at the command line, or from within a batch file, by the simple command "del /s *.dso". The simpler solution is to let a script do it for you, however, and if that's the route you choose to go then I suggest you visit Panama Jack's Scripting. Download his all-in-one pack, install it, and choose to have it delete all of the *.dso files at the end of every session. You'll be glad you did. For those who are curious, the *.dso files contain the compiled code for all of the scripts in your T2 installation; thus, deleting them simply causes the game to recompile them at every run.
Another cause of the UE errors involves sound drivers, and this seems particularly to be the case with Soundblaster Live cards. If you're having this problem with a Soundblaster Live card, then I suggest switching to use the Miles audio system from the game settings. Seriously, I was never able to get EAX working stably with my old Soundblaster Live card, and it just wasn't worth the ongoing trouble. For sake of reference, I haven't had that problem with an Audigy 2 Platinum card, even when using the EAX2 sound system. No matter what sound card you have, try using the Miles sound system; it seems to be the most stable option of the bunch.
Second, there are a number of frame rate issues with T2. If you find yourself getting a lot of jerky gameplay, particularly when outdoors in large areas, then you should try disabling the "Interior Textured Fog" graphics option. I know it seems strange that a setting with that name would make a big difference outdoors, but it does. For whatever reason, there seems to be some kind of problem with the T2 engine determining what it really needs to render, and with that setting checked it acts like it's rendering a lot more than it needs to at any given moment. Try the other options as well, for many of them also help boost the frame rate.
Finally, there are problems with ATI video cards when trying to use full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) or anisotropic filtering (AF). With AF enabled, several of the in-game graphics will not work as they should. For example, lava has a certain "shifting surface" look to it thanks to multiple textures, but it will be entirely static and boring by comparison with AF enabled. To the best of my knowledge, there is no workaround for this problem other than disabling AF. In truth, though, the game's own filtering does a pretty good job, so it's not such a big issue.
The situation with FSAA is a bit more serious, however, insofar as all of the game's menu screens will be blank. Only a small portion of the screen right around the cursor will be visible, and though it is technically possible to work with the game's menus that way, it's very difficult. At the time of this writing, the latest video drivers from ATI (Catalyst v3.5) still have this problem. There is a pretty good workaround, however, in the form of a third-party script. Click here to download the script, then unzip it into your Tribes2\GameData\base\scripts folder. What it does is change the update rate for the menu screens. If they flicker on your system, edit the script and change the number near the top. I find that a value of 10 works almost perfectly on my system (the default is 13), but you may find other values work better for you.