Silver Chaos 1

What works

Now the funny thing: this time I test the game with two different machines running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and giver two different results!

The PC 1 is a custom computer which is powered by a dual-core Pentium D 3,4 GHz with 4 Gb of RAM and a NVidia GT440 card with 1 Gb of VRAM. The sound chipset is a Realtek Audio HD (ALH 888). This computer are using the lastest official NVidia drivers (295.20).

The PC 2 is an old Toshiba laptop (10 years!) powered by a Pentium 4 at 2 GHz, only 256 Mb of RAM and an obsolete ATI Radeon 9000 chipset (32 MB of VRAM). The sound chipset is an AC97.

In the ATI laptop, I use the open-source radeon driver, since ATI was outdated support a long time ago. However is still powerfull to activate some Desktop effects and some 3D acceleration.

 Both machines install and update without issues.

 The PC1 fail to play the game, but the older PC2 can play the game but with some issues !!!

What does not

The PC1 can start the game, and play the intro menu sound but hangs with a black screen after the very first introduction texts (since the game is a visual novel, the playing method is basically to scroll the texts and watch the images).

The PC2 start the game, and it's playable. However the sound fails just after 1 or less seconds, due to PulseAudio issues.

 The PC2 have some problems with the mouse, since the buttons of the menus lose focus, and one workaround is to use the keyboard to select the game options.
 To save the game is necessary to switch the graphic mode from fullscreen to windowed and save it, and then back again to fullscreen and exit the game, otherwise the game will hang when restart again.
 To load a game, just start the game in fullscreen and select the save point.

Workarounds

What was not tested

With an english version, I can make a full test and try to finish the game and unlock all CG's.

I don't test the game with the PC1 with open-source NVidia drivers.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The game can be rated Gold or Platinum due to some genuine Wine bugs, and using a two machines test show the failure of PC1 is due to a faulty NVidia driver. The problem of 295.20 version also hangs games like Assassin's Creed series, or Shogun 2 Total War which with old driver versions those games was playable. Admin note: rating changed to conform to the rating definitions.