I've just downloaded and installed the 2.01 Windows version of DC Squares. The PC is an Athlon 64 3000+, 1G RAM, running Windows XP SP2.

Each time I launch the app, the disk spins for a while, and eventually I get the error message:
The application failed to initialize properly.... (0x00000006)

Any ideas what the problem may be?

Thanks,
Steve

It's been so long since I built the PC I don't remember what actual video card I put in. I seldom play games on PCs, so I usually just get the cheapest video card I can find with the desired connectivity.

According to WinXP Device Manager, though, the card manufacturer is ATI, and the card is a Radeon 9200 SE.

I saw somewhere (one of your posts, the FAQ, ?) you wrote that with a particular video card the graphics functioned improperly, and the game would be unplayable due to something not appearing properly.

In this case, however, the game won't even start. SO, I thought the problem may be something entirely different. I've been wrong before, however, so it could easily happen again.

Please try running http://sigbox.c99.org/~sam/dcsquares-debug.exe from the DCSquares directory and let me know what the last message is before it crashes.

Thanks.

Alright, I changed the optimization settings, perhaps it's an issue with AMD 64. Try http://sigbox.c99.org/~sam/dcsquares-debug2.exe

I did a bit of googling, and it appears that error message can be caused by permissions on NTFS. It can mean that your user doesn't have read access to a required DLL.

Try replacing the MFC dlls with the ones from http://www.qhimm.com/mfc.zip. If that doesn't work, try deleting the MFC dlls (MFC71.dll, MFC71ENU.DLL, msvcp71.dll, and msvcr71.dll) so it will use your system-installed version (assuming you have MFC 7.1 in windows\system32).

If it still doesn't work, then there's something unusual about your Windows install that prevents MFC 7.1 from starting up properly.

Well, I've effectively given up on this.

According to the ATI website, my card supports OpenGL. However, they don't specify whether that support is hardware-based, or simply something in the driver.

Everytime I start the program, the PC goes into never-never land for 2 or 3 minutes with much disk-thrashing. When it comes back, I get the error I described above, with an OK button. Hitting the OK button clears that error box and immediately causes another identical error box. Clearing that error box clears it, as you'd expect, with no more errors or messages.

I tried downloading a few other, unrelated OpenGL apps, as well as a couple of OpenGL screensavers. With every single OpenGL app I've tried, launching the app gives the same errors as DCSquares.

So, it seems clear to me that my system has some issue with OpenGL.

Thanks for trying to help so far. If you, or anyone else, has any ideas as to what I could try to resolve this, I'm interested, but as this is my work PC I won't be able to do anything too radical.

I've got the game working on my Dreamcast, so at least I can get play a little bit there. Now, if only my PS/2->DC adapter will arrive already, so I can use an optical mouse!

Sounds like an issue with NX, then. When you disabled that, you got a white screen over Remote Desktop, correct? That's normal behavior for Remote Desktop with OpenGL, it does the same thing for me. If you want to (attempt to) play it remotely, VNC will show the contents of the OpenGL window, but it will be painfully slow.

Try the same thing locally and the white empty area should show the game :)

-Sam