G'day thanks for your time

my son recently installed a radeon 3870 512mb pci express graphic card to upgrade / replace the onboard 128mb but has lossed all small black text routes, activities , consists ,options blah blah blah BUT msts still seems to work can drive trains. Computer is 1.8g core2 win XP pro service pack 3
After cleaning up the registry and reinstalling msts tried every setting possible in the radeon/ati software with on change

Any suggestions would be of great help many thanks jeff

Hi jeffmary,

I am not sure what would cause these error's that your son is having but I can suggest downloading and installing the following files

MSTS update found at http://steam4me.railpage.org.au/trainsi ... S_Updates/
and click on MSTS v1.2 Train Simulator Update

And download these files from http://steam4me.railpage.org.au/trainsim/ scroll down and on the right side of the screen you will find Utilities

Click on the following files

FCalc2 for Windows by Joe Realmuto & Okrasa Ghia
TS Fast-Fix {installs Fcalc2 calculations}


The last thing your son would need to install is MSTS Bin Stable Release from http://mstsbin.uktrainsim.com/eng/eng.html

I hope that this fixes everything let us know if you have anymore problems

Regards Phil

Hi Jeff,
On reading your problem I assume the problem is you can not see lower case text when you look at files or folders with windows explorer in your Train Simulator directory.
If this is the problem I would look at the properties of the Train Simulator folder or the sub folders to see if files are set as hidden .
I had a problem like this on a route were activites were not showing up in windows explorer but were there when I ran msts.
I run vista and the activites were set as undefined files .
Regards Geoff.

thanks for the reply phil

I'am aware of and do have all the updates to msts .... strange one this it is a fairly high performance graphic card with the up to date drivers .

being a fairly large family there are a number of computers of all types in the family for business to pleasure I'am starting to think the culprit maybe service pack 3 the computer in question is the only one with sp3 and the only one with trouble running msts

again thank phil jeff

amwleis thank you also

I talking after msts has loaded click on drive a train the menus thereafter routes blank activities blank consists blank Same with trying to change general options like , keyboard , display etc blank. You can click on these blank menus not knowing what has been selected and find yourself driving a gp38 over marias pass with very good graphics

amwleis thanks again jeff

Hi Jeff,

I also have Windows XP service pack 3 installed on my laptop computer so this might not be the problem. Try removing the new graphics card and putting your old one back in and see how you go because there might be a fault within the graphics card sometimes this can happen

Regards Phil

Jeff,

Have you disabled the motherboards onboard graphics chip in the BIOS?

I would also suggest running the MPROFILE.EXE program in the train simulator folder as this will ‘advise’ MSTS that new hardware has been installed and configure it self for the new video card.

I have also just read through the readme.rtf file in the MSTS application folder. It seems missing or illegible text is often related to the video card driver.

The following issue was described:

Riva 128 chipset (Get latest drivers from NVIDIA (http://www.nvidia.com)
· Fonts corrupted--fixed with the latest reference driver.
· User Interface quality is poor. Latest drivers fix this.
· User Interface text is nearly illegible. For some video cards with 4MB of video RAM, the UI text may appear in block form, be distorted or not display. Try using the Launcher troubleshooter and selecting the “Textures are distorted” check box, or the “Text is distorted or not displayed” check box.
To access the Launcher:
1. From the directory where you installed Train Simulator, double-click Launcher.exe.
2. Choose Troubleshooting from the menu that appears.


Admittedly this is for a very old video card but try running Launcher.exe and going to the troubleshooting options to see if changing any of the tick boxes helps resolve your problem.

Do you have MSTS-BIN installed?

If you have - have you recently changed to a newer version?

When changing MSTS-BIN versions, you have to copy the new .dll files :

From George's website - Quote

'From new "DLLs" subfolder in root of game choose your language folder and copy string.dll and dialog.dll and copy them into root of game. Confirm replace original ones.'

- Unquote

If you have the wrong .dll files in your MSTS installation it will show the wrong text, and even in some cases make that text invisible!!!!