Game locks up on first loading screen.

[ryan0316]

After starting the screen, it displays the first loading screen with all the Evil Geniuses, henchmen, minions and junk. The loading bar on the bottom left gets maybe a tiny bit of yellow, or sometimes doesn't do anything at all.

The hourglass cursor is visible and movable for about 3 seconds, before it freezes in place and my computer freezes up entirely, forcing a hard reboot.

It's patched, I don't have a virus, I defrag'd my computer and verified the game cache, tried running it after disabling all other processes, emulated a single-core processor, reinstalled, I've even tried starting it in windowed mode but for some reason fullscreen=0 doesn't cause it to start windowed. Nothing has caused a significant change.

I recall I had this problem before and there was a workaround, but I don't remember what exactly I did. I believe it was something with my video card. Unfortunately I don't know them well enough to play around with on my own.

For reference, relevant specs:

Windows XP Home Edition
4.338 GHz AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3800+
1 GB DDR2 Ram
NVidia GeForce 9400 GT
And some kind of Asus motherboard. All I know offhand is that it has a PCI Express slot.

[Skrittak]

It keeps on happening to me as well. If you verify the game integrity through the properties tabs then it finds some files are corrupted/don't match and re downloads them.

That then fixes it for me, but i have to do it every time i restart my pc

EDIT: Thats actually no longer working, every time i crash and verify it redownloads 4 files. God knows what's going on. Fresh reinstalled and everything, no change

[ryan0316]

Tried it a couple times. It doesn't find anything wrong with any files, and it's still freezing up.

[Post Monster]

It's definitely caused by corrupted files. I have the same issue. I'm seeing if uninstalling and reinstalling the game helps.

[ryan0316]

I found the solution.

Control Panel > Audio and Sound Devices > Audio Tab > Advanced, under sound playback > Performance.

Set Hardware acceleration to none. That screwed up my sound, but it was working. Sound was fixed when I set the hardware acceleration to one more.

[Post Monster]

Shouldn't there be a way to disable hardware acceleration for this game alone?

[CaptainDingo]

Not that I know of. It's all or nothing.

You might have an audio driver issue. Might want to do some research on what motherboard you have and what its onboard audio is, and find drivers for it.

[Insanehitman]

Tried the sound thing.Worked.Although i was able to play EG without it locking up without setting the hardware acceleration thing.

[Apollo27]

Have you edited any of the game files recently, like enabling the developer's console?

[Camellia]

It's been impossible to adjust hardware acceleration since Vista, and I have the same problem. How do I fix this?

My drivers are completely up to date but evil genius still crashes when trying to use my sound card.

Please help, I haven't been able to play the game AT ALL even though I bought it months ago.

[Camellia]

ok then