blanking out video

[evildragon]

I have this old Lion King interactive story book CD-ROM that I used to use when I was a little kid. (back in the days of Windows 3.11 and 486's).

I want my baby sister to use it, so I took out the old 486 it was used with way back then.

installed the OS, drivers, and the game.. (still got all the CDs! in no scratch conditions too).

But everytime it plays an animated clip, the whole screen goes blank, and the old 2X CD-ROM (mitsumi interface) spins up, and next thing I know, I'm actually staring at the BIOS setup!!

I replaced the RAM, and still same behavior..

Motherboard or BIOS shot?

 

[Yzzerdd]

I recall reading about how finicky the video was for this thing...but where....Oh yeah!

Few products get accused of killing Christmas for thousands of kids, but that fate befell Disney's first CD-ROM for Windows. The problem: The game relied on Microsoft's new WinG graphics engine, and video card drivers had to be hand-tuned to work with it, says Alex St. John. He's currently CEO of game publisher WildTangent, but in the early 1990s he was Microsoft's first "game evangelist."
In late 1994, Compaq released a Presario whose video drivers hadn't been tested with WinG. When parents loaded the Lion King disc into their new Presarios on Christmas morning, many children got their first glimpse of the Blue Screen of Death. But this sad story has a happy ending. The WinG debacle led Microsoft to develop a more stable and powerful graphics engine called DirectX. And the team behind DirectX went on to build the Xbox--restoring holiday joy for a new generation of kids.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125772-page,3/article.html

--Ryan

 

[Trixter]

I have this old Lion King interactive story book CD-ROM that I used to use when I was a little kid. (back in the days of Windows 3.11 and 486's).

I want my baby sister to use it, so I took out the old 486 it was used with way back then.

installed the OS, drivers, and the game.. (still got all the CDs! in no scratch conditions too).

But everytime it plays an animated clip, the whole screen goes blank, and the old 2X CD-ROM (mitsumi interface) spins up, and next thing I know, I'm actually staring at the BIOS setup!!

I replaced the RAM, and still same behavior..

Motherboard or BIOS shot?

None! It's actually the software. The Lion King Interactive Storybook uses a very VERY VERY early version of WinG (remember that?) which was buggy as hell and does very bad hammering directly on hardware. I ran into the same thing with this beast 15-odd years ago.

Your best bet is to change your video card and try to reinstall.

 

[Mike Chambers]

i was going to say i'd assume a funky CD drive or interface, but Trixter knows what he's talking about so ignore me here.

/increases post count

 

[evildragon]

it used to work way back in the day though.. i remember it, used to play it all the time, and was the reason my father had to upgrade past the 4MB stock RAM.

Maybe when stock the video drivers were different than on the restore CD.

 

[vwestlife]

None! It's actually the software. The Lion King Interactive Storybook uses a very VERY VERY early version of WinG (remember that?) which was buggy as hell and does very bad hammering directly on hardware. I ran into the same thing with this beast 15-odd years ago.

From the Wikipedia article:

WinG would also perform a graphics hardware/driver profiling test on the first execution of the program in order to determine the best way to manipulate the graphics hardware. This test showed a window full of red curved lines, sections of which would wobble as performance was tested. Once WinG had determined the fastest calls that did not cause graphics corruption, a profile would be saved so that the test would not need to be performed again.

I remember that "wiggly worms" test from the bad old days of Windows 3.11! I used it on a regular basis up until 2001, and it was actually a lot more stable than Windows 95/98 ever has been for me.