02-11-2001 07:03									#1
	Unable to locate draw buffer... Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

...terminating program. Anyone else get this error message? I'm running a 1 Ghz Athlon PC with Windows Me installed. The game runs fine for a while, then I get this message and I'm unable to play unless I restart the computer. I was wondering if anyone had a possible solution for it.

	02-11-2001 09:49									#2
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

oh yeah... I got the same problem too...

	02-11-2001 17:08									#3
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

Well, add me to the list. I'm searching for an answer. About how long can you play before the crash, and what are you normally doing at the time. For me, I can't play more than 5 minutes ...

	02-11-2001 17:32									#4
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

I play for about five minutes too. The thing is, this error ocurrs at seemingly random times. The last two times it happened I was moving an archer across desert terrain, and fiddling with production orders in the city window. I've already e-mailed Firaxis about this, and checked the FAQ, but have yet to find a solution.

	02-11-2001 17:55									#5
	Support Apolyton

I just updated the driver on my Radeon DDR 32 Mb. Seemed to fix it ... but perhaps I was just lucky. I played for 15 minutes just now with no problem. Do you have the same card, maybe?

	02-11-2001 17:57									#6
	Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

As a matter of fact, I do. Unfortunately I'm also pretty technically inept. How would I go about updating the drivers?

	02-11-2001 17:59									#7
	Remove this text

I'll getcha the link! One moment...

	02-11-2001 18:02									#8
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

Go here. You'll notice the "I agree" button all the way at the bottom of the page. Simply download the file and run it. Just let it choose its default folder at the start of installing, etc., and it will do the rest for you. You'll then need to reboot.

Go try it and tell me if that works!

	02-11-2001 18:44									#9
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

Yeah i'm getting that msg. also! but i have a inno3d tornadio geforce2 gts pro. I also changed the drivers and that's when I started to get the msg....

	02-11-2001 19:00									#10
	Increase Your PM Length

Sounds like you need to actually roll your driver back.

	02-11-2001 21:10									#11
	Enter the AD-FREE zone

This problems has been diescussed multimple times on the forum.

The short answer is this:

1) reduce the number of background applications running. Civ is a resource pig and needs as much systme resources as possible

2) Reduce the number of fonts in yoour font directory to less than 256 or so - more than that and civ seems to have difficulty recognizing the Lucinda font that it uses

Good luck - in the future please use the search capability to see if others have reported similar issues.

	03-11-2001 04:55									#12
	Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

This problem had NOTHING to do with fonts. This is a card-specific issue relating to a driver update. Also, I have left ALL my apps running in the background and have no problems.

	03-11-2001 04:56									#13
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

But I should say: The things you suggest seem to help people with different configurations.

	03-11-2001 05:11									#14
	Support Apolyton

Crap... I can't update my driver because they don't have one with BIOS number 113-76801-100 on the site. It suggests e-mailing them, but I can't get that to work either.

	03-11-2001 06:22									#15
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

BIOS number? Hmmm, did that happen to you when you tried installing? Otherwise I just installed the one on that site, with no problems.

	03-11-2001 06:55									#16
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

Geez, this is weird. Apparently tech support has been getting a lot of calls about this. I just got off the phone with them, and it may have something to do with my sound card... but he also said that they're trying to figure out whether this is a DirectX 8 problem or something concerning ATI cards (but yours works... WTF?)
God forbid I should be able to play the game right out of the box...

	03-11-2001 08:22									#17
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

From my understanding of the problem, the game can't find some components to draw to in the hardware.

If upgrading your drivers didn't work, try reinstalling DirectX 8.1.

	03-11-2001 09:37									#18
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

Yes, I also reinstalled DirectX just for good measure. Perhaps that was part of the solution. Good call, Asher. <== See that?