I just purchased PA on the steam sales, installed the game and when i go to run it, a windowed screen opens blacked out, the cursor changes to what i assume is the in game cursor, some music begins to play and then the window turns white and the 'Pa.exe has stopped working' error appears. I am running windows 7 with the specs to run the game and I have fully updated my graphics card drivers. Thanks.
Could you post your dxdiag just to see if your drivers are really updated? Especially if you have and AMD card.
First of all you have 4GB ram in your laptop which is about minimum required for this game. Maybe increasing paging file (virtual memory) to 14GB (minimum paging file 14GB and maximum a bit more) could help - 14Gb is going to be the amount of reserved memory on the hard drive for virtual memory so if you don't have enough space on your hard drive for that skip this or make it at least 8GB which is the old rule (virtual should be twice as much as your ram ammount). Also as Kiwi said there is something wrong with your video driver for you AMD chip. Try installing latest stable amd catalyst driver (Omega 14.12). AMD driver for your laptop is here: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/mobile?os=Windows 7 - 64 Instructions to increase virtual memory here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-virtual-memory-size#1TC=windows-7
I just downloaded and updated the drivers. I had to reinstall my monitor as a VGA because an error refused to turn on the backlight. Is this not a common problem? Would you like the dxdiag again?
As much as I can see that driver you have on the new dxdiag list for your amd chip on your laptop is from 2010. Do you use Windows update for drivers or did you install the amd driver from the link I gave you?
i downloaded, installed and ran the program from the link you gave me. Is there anything else I can try? Video drivers have never been a problem for me before. And I know I can run it because my friends laptop has worse specs then me and he runs it effortlessly.
Do you by any chance have any of programs on this list installed? Some of these programs are known to make problems with the game not running then http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/558751813508748383/ More help with problems here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/619569341100468621/
I search my latop and I have Norton installed and PA is on the allow list. Does it change anything if it keeps crashing but opening in windowed mode
I'm 90% sure it's the drivers though. As Matster mentioned, they are from 2010, which is too old for PA. Unlike most game, PA uses OpenGL instead of DirectX and for that it really needs the latest drivers since they contain many bug fixes that causes crashes like that. If you go to add/remove software thingy (sorry, not up to date with my Windows terminology), does it show and AMD or ATI software there? If so, can you uninstall all of it? After rebooting, you will have a horribly tiny screen, but that's normal. Then reinstall the Omega drivers and reboot again. Your screen should go back to normal and hopefully, the dxdiag will show the updated drivers this time.
Yeah, I agree that it must be the video drivers since they are way too old. It looks like a failed driver install at this point. Arcangel uninstall AMD Catalyst Install Manager and Catalyst Control Center under control panel > programs and reinstall the drivers.
Just so im certain before in go deleting stuff; I will reinstall the drivers through device manager. Update; uninstalled all amd programs in control pannel-programs list and nothing happened, the drivers weren't uninstalled and it continued to function like nothing had changed Can I change something in the options to run dx instead of openGL
The problem is that this game is not made for Directx cause directx is not really made for crossplatform development (Windows, Linux and Mac). You need updated drivers to play this game im sorry to say. Delete drivers through device manager then and don't have windows update set to automatic updates or it will install missing drivers automatically. Install AMD catalyst package again. If that does not work im not sure if you can get your laptop to run the game.
FIXED Im not sure how this worked but i entirely uninstalled my graphics drivers, while using the integrated graphics driver i installed catalyst and let it work out my graphics drivers. After the restart the backlight wouldnt turn on however, when i shone a light on it i could just see the screen. (To fix this start in safe mode and reinstall the driver w/o catalyst). I navigated in the dark and reinstalled the driver while on blackscreen and then after the restart everything appeared to go back to normal however, the game started.
Laptop GPU drivers are such a pain I have an Intel / nvidia laptop and drivers on this can be sketchy too. Well done finding a solution
