Monday, June 08, 2009

Intel's Laptop Gaming SDK Sucks

Well, fuck me.

I have an Acer Aspire One, and I decide I want to play Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on it. A quick search of Google tells me that, before I get started, I am going to need to use 3DAnalyze. It also reveals YouTube video of it working on this very laptop.

Well, fuck, it doesn't seem that hard. All I have to do is set "Emulate Hardware TnL", and set a VendorID and ProductID to that of a nVidia card (and the 3DAnalyse window gives some ID values for nVidia cards to use, making that non-trivial).

Sure, whatever, should work. It works for other people, should work for me. Do exactly what they do, it should work.

Right, nothing in life is ever that simple.

So I go start up 3DAnalyse, I set the options, and start the game. But, when you go to actually

But why? It's a pretty random crash, and there seems to be no documented cases of this bug. Worse off, most gamers that have computer expertise, that expertise is usually in hardware, and some basic Windows troubleshooting. Sadly, the only way I was even able to pinpoint the problem is because I know the inner workings of software.

I can start the game, get to the main menu, set settings, etc., but anything that tries to show shiny 3D graphics causes a crash in the Intel Laptop Gaming SDK DLL (IntelLaptopGaming.dll), which sucks ass. Particularly, go to Quickplay, select a difficulty (any will do), select a song (any will do), and wait on the "Loading" screen. When it's done loading, say "Hello, desktop!" as the game crashes and dies.

I have the GNU debugger setup as my system debugger. GDB shows that the crash happens in the Intel DLL, about 2-3 functions deep from GH3.exe. What is going on, I can't tell, due to the black-box nature of commercial software.

To date, I have no idea what's wrong.

If it matters, I am running Windows XP Home Edition, Service Pack 3.

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