Zanzarah won't start

I've just installed Zanzarah on my Win 98 system, and it refuses to start. Instead I get this completely black screen, with the mouse cursor, after the splash screen. I can't go nowhere form the black screen. Not even ctrl + alt + delete works, so there's only the reset button left.

There's this setup utility you can run before starting the game, and I've almost tried every possible setting, but without success.

The game works perfectly on my girlfriends Win 2000 computer.

I've tried the only available patch (which is supposed to be for the German version only, but it seemed to install correctly), but the same thing still happens.

I believe this is a video card problem related to Geforce and TNT cards. Some of the newer drivers did not work with this game and I know several people who had to go back to an earlier driver version in order to get the game to run, and there was never any patch for this unfortunately.

Somewhere in the Zanzarah forum it explains which drivers you will need.

This game will not work with the newer Nvidia drivers. I have not played it yet, but the 30.82 drivers were recommended by players who have found them to work with Zanzarah. Right now I have 40.72.

This might very well be the problem. I use a 128 MB GeForce 4 4800 Ti SE with the Detonator driver. However, my girlfriend uses the same driver for a 64 MB GeForce card, and the game runs perfectly on her computer.

I have 41.09. How do I get back to an older version?

Find the version that you want, download it, and install. I believe it will ask if you wish to "confirm" that you want to override the present drivers, and in this case you would say yes. That should take care of it. Hopefully, then the game will run.

I found the 30.82 drivers, but when I try to install it I get this message that no Nvidia hardware is installed on my computer. I also found a newer driver, 44.03, which installed perfectly. The game still didn't start however.

I wonder if the Geforce 4 is too recent a card for the older 30.82 drivers to detect.

That's probably it. So, I guess I have to play Zanzarah on my girlfriends computer. Which means no more Sims for two weeks.

Hi Mikael,