Retail Collector's Edition immediately crashes

[Cantido]

Okay, I have my copy of the Collector's Edition, and could use some help modding it. And even starting it. Someone recommended Oblivion not being on Steam, and since I was not willing to clean out Steam to do a reinstall, I decided to hold out for a retail copy.

 

Well that retail copy of the new 5th Anniversary Edition immediately crashes upon starting, past the Bethasda logo. I called Bethsada's Tech Support, and while I'm pleased they have it for a five year old game, they were not very helpful. They said that because Oblivion was meant for a Core 2 Duo, it will not run on my AMD Phenom II, which is six core. The thing ran on Steam vanilla, why wouldn't it run the retail copy?!

 

The last time, I installed OBSE, Mod Manager, Wyre Bash, and BOSS, but I exclusively used Mod Manager and BOSS because Wyre Bash was too confusing, and the guides out there suck. I can't even find any that says "How to make a Batched Patch." And as far as I know I don't have to do anything with OBSE.

 

I played this on Xbox and had a rotten time because my character was weak. I have my first gaming PC in ten years and fully intend to play this. I collected a ton of mods already but have decided I only want certain items if FCOM is too crazy:

 

I absolutely want:

Texture Pack

Realistic Leveling

All Natural

ANYTHING else that would make leveling not suck.

 

I would consider:

FCOM

* If FCOM is too demanding I would consider just one of the big four mods.

Music Pack

Sound Pack

Anything anyone recommends that takes priority over anything I just said.

 

Previous Issues:

* I don't understand Wyre Bash- I can't figure out how to use it in conjunction with Mod Manager and BOSS. I would always install something with Mod Manager, then sort it with BOSS, then move on to the next mod. This ended up with lots of mods that all had the same installation time, and I can't find out how to edit that in Wyre Bash, nor do I know how to use Batched Patch.

 

Any help with this would be amazing. I have a gaming PC for the first time in ten years and have been tearing up League of Legends and Witcher, but it's aaaaaallllll about Oblivion, and the upcoming Skyrim.

[David Brasher]

No sense thinking about mods.

 

The issue is getting vanilla Oblivion to run on your hardware. If that challenge cannot be beaten, then you will never get as far as using mods.

 

I imagine you have tried reinstalling your CD version of Oblivion in case the first install was corrupt?

 

If you had the Steam version of Oblivion working on your computer, then that sounds like the easiest thing to do. You know it works and have done it before. That would be the path of least resistance. The tech support professional told you that your hardware is not compatible with the CD version of the game. It is good to take things with a grain of salt, but there is a significant chance that he was telling the truth or knows what he is talking about.

[MarkInMKUK]

First, if you are running Windows 7, install the game to c:\Games\Oblivion - if it is installed under c:\Program Files (or c:\Program Files (x86) ) you will have major problems adding mods later.

 

 

Wrye Bash VERY basic walkthrough. Start with Wrye Bash v291 (at the moment) - v292 and onwards seem to have a couple of glitches.

 

Wrye Bash is not a totally "Stand alone" program, it uses another program (or set of programs) to work. The main bulk of the background work is done, currently, by "Python", which is what is called a scripting language interpreter. You write a series of instructions in a form Python can handle, and it uses those to automate various tasks. An example might be to tell Python to look through a list of files, and wherever the list told it to, change the file type from ".esp" to ".esp.ghost". You COULD go through several hundred files yourself to do that, but you'd be almost certain to make a mistake, whereas if you write the script it is to follow correctly, Python will not make any errors no matter how many times you do the job.

 

The upshot of this is, that running Wrye Bash at all relies on Python being correctly installed first.

 

OK, so, we will assume that you have a correct Python install, and have installed Wrye Bash, and BOSS as well. There SHOULD be a shortcut labelled "Wrye Bash Launcher" on your desktop if all went well. Double-click it as you would any other desktop shortcut, and Wrye Bash will pop up a small window while starting, then its main window.

 

At the top of the Wrye Bash window is a series of tabs labelled "Installers", "Mods", "Saves", etc. Make sure the one labelled "Mods" is selected - the others can be ignored for the moment.

 

Next, look right at the bottom of the window. You should see a series of icons, including a pale green and pale pink aquare, and the familiar Oblivion icon. Depending which other Oblivion-related programs you also have installed, you may see icons for paint.NET, Blender, Bink Video utilities, and plenty of programs which I also don't have installed. The one to look for is the word "Boss" in black lettering.

 

If you have both of those, you are well on your way to building a "Bashed Patch". Next - a little bit of setting up...

 

Firstly the second column on the screen currently shows something like "Lo...". In the same way you would if using a spreadsheet, hover your mouse next to that label until you find the vertical bar separating it from the next column (labelled "R"). Click and drag that to the right, until the header says "Load order". Once you can see that, release the mouse click, and then click ON the words "Load Order". The column below, and the associated mods, should organise themselves into numerical order, starting with "00" at the top, and increasing as you go down the column. With me so far?

 

Secondly, right-click anywhere on the bar with the "File" and "Load Order" labels in. A pop-up menu should appear. Remove the tick from "Lock Times" if there is one, and make sure there are ticks in front of "BOSS disable lock times" and "Always update BOSS masterlist prior to running BOSS".

 

Now, click the BOSS icon at the bottom of the screen. There will be a small popup while the Masterlist updates, and BOSS runs, and then a window will open with the "Better Oblivion Sorting Software Log" in it. Read down it, and you should see familiar mod names, along with some arcane comments about "Bash tag suggestions". Check through the whole list for anything labelled "Error" or "Warning" - these need to be dealt with (or at the very least, understood) before trying to go further.

 

If you close the BOSS log and go back to the Wrye Bash window, you may well find that mods have changed order in the window. BOSS has used its Masterlist to determine what it thinks is the best load order, and adjusted the date and time stamps of the files so that they load in that order.

 

Now, left-click on ANY one of the mods, and press Ctrl+A to select all of the mods. They should all be highlighted. Right-click the highlight, and select "Mark Mergeable" from the Pop-up. After a few seconds, a window will pop up giving a list of the files that Wrye Bash believes can be merged, either partially or fully, into its Bashed Patch file. If they weren't alredy, you may now notice that the text has changed colour for some of the mod names, and the boxes to the left of the names may also have changed colour.

 

Scroll down towards the bottom of your mod list. Ideally right at the bottom, you should find a file marked "Bashed Patch, 0.esp". If this is not present, follow the instructions in the Wrye Bash readme to locate it and copy it (NOT move it) to the correct place, then re-run BOSS.

 

Once you have a Bashed Patch" file, the next stage is to USE it. Right-click the file, and select "Rebuild patch". Another popup will appear (unless you, for some reason, have no mergeable mods)...

 

"The following mods are mergeable. While it is not important to Wrye Bash functionality or the end contents of the bashed patch, it is suggest that they be deactivated and merged into the patch; this (helps) avoid the Oblivion maximum esp/m limit."

 

There will then be a list of mod files, followed by

 

"Automatically deactivate those mods now?"

 

Click "Yes".

 

The next popup has DOZENS of options in the left-hand window. The one we are interested in this first time through is the second item on the list, "Merge Patches". Put a tick in the box next to it, and then tick all of the files which appear in the right-hand window by selecting the "Select all" button. Now click the button marked "Build Patch". A popup will tell you that the program is working, and give you a progress bar.

 

Once completed, another popup will tell you what it did, so just hit "OK". It will probably prompt you to "Activate the Bashed patch" - do so by clicking the box next to it, and a tick will appear. The ticks in some of the other boxes will have disappeared now, or been replaced with + or dot marks. This tells you what their new status is.

 

You may now close Wrye Bash, and run Oblivion, and the whole things SHOULD work just as before, but with less files active, so a smaller load list.

Edited July 16, 2011 by MarkInMKUK

[Cantido]

No sense thinking about mods.

 

The issue is getting vanilla Oblivion to run on your hardware. If that challenge cannot be beaten, then you will never get as far as using mods.

 

I imagine you have tried reinstalling your CD version of Oblivion in case the first install was corrupt?

 

If you had the Steam version of Oblivion working on your computer, then that sounds like the easiest thing to do. You know it works and have done it before. That would be the path of least resistance. The tech support professional told you that your hardware is not compatible with the CD version of the game. It is good to take things with a grain of salt, but there is a significant chance that he was telling the truth or knows what he is talking about.

 

I reinstalled Oblivion on Steam, and it does the same thing. A small window opens in the top right, the Bethasda video plays for two seconds, then the whole thing crashes. This is a worse situation, but it means there is a more universal problem. Oblivion worked before on steam. I wonder what could be wrong. But this means it's not Steam.

 

I realized what's different: Between the hiatus from when I tried this on Steam and when I tried a retail copy, I changed video cards:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047N0XBM

 

How do I make Oblivion accept it?

Edited July 16, 2011 by Cantido

[bben46]

First, The way Oblivion uses the Windows registry it doesn't allow more than one copy of the game on a computer. I recommend completely removing the steam version if you are not going to be using it. Then cleaning the registry to remove all traces of that version.

 

As for the new graphics card, be sure to delete the Oblivion.ini file that is in the same place as the save games as that is reliant on the video card that was originally detected the first time you ever started the game. The next time you start, it will generate a new Oblivion.ini based on the new card. It will probably say it coulden't identify it and start you with low resolution - then you make any changes to get the resolution up to what you want and make a save - that will be saved to the new ini file.

 

I don't know how well it works with the steam version, but Here is a link to my complete uninstall/reinstall procedure located in the WIKI section of the Nexus

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Oblivion_reinstall_procedure

 

It allows you to preserve any saves and mods, or remove them completely - your choice.

 

Then, good install practice, DO NOT install any mods or anything else before getting the vanilla game to work first. Then make a backup copy of the Oblivion\data folder. before starting to install mods. :thumbsup: