Fahrenheit on Vista (how-to guide) and how Atari treats its customers
Background: "Best of Atari" european release of Fahrenheit, bought December2007 in a retail store. Laptop - Core2Duo 2GHz, 2GB RAM, GeForce 8600M GT 256MB (169.28 driver), 1280x800 widescreen monitor, WinVista 32bit SP0.
1- installation - you insert the DVD, start the installer and get an error of some sort which leaves you with nothing. on Atari support page there is no information whatsoever and you even have to register-login to download a Patch for the game!!! wtf? Ok, after 30min I was lucky and found the workaround in the forums: There is a solution which also makes the game patchable by ahikaki (in Atari Europe forum "Fahrenheit with Vista (final release)" thread). Now there is one more solution to try as well, but back then ahikaki's solution worked for me.
2- patching - (btw, I am not sure if I had to apply patch to my version, but I couldn't find any version information, so I did it) Nice, installer works! But now I've got another famous problem - "Please inseart DVD" :laugh: Solution/hack - get a no-cd from a warez Fahrenheit! Sounds great - thank you crackers for making the only existing fix to run Atari licensed software!! If you don't like to download a no-cd crack from a **** website with porn banners, then sorry, you won't get any help from Atari on this one 8)
3- setting up - great news, the game which was designed to run as a widescreen movie Does not support widescreen resolutions by no means known to man! So if you have widescreen monitor like mine, you can disable all scaling options in nVidia control panel to get undistorted image. On a full-HD resolution monitor the best setting is 1600x1200 (if your monitor has 1200 pixel by vertical). Either way you will be playing on a small portion of total screen space.
4- running - in my case I pushed 8x anisotropy and 4x AA together with everything on max, and it was fine, till in some action sequences the display driver kept crashing and restarting. It was annoying up to one episode where it crashed too much and after continuous Alt-tabing and driver restarts I even got a couple of BSODs. So I found the if you don't use AA and anisotropy in my case the game did not crash in the worst places and display driver had next to no problems in all the remaining sequences.
5- what else? - for me it was it, but if you have a 64bit OS then you will encounter at least one more problem with Fahrenheit, I hope the fix for 64bit WinXP on Atari support site helps with Vista64bit, so have fun 8)
The reason I wrote all of this is that in my experience, I have installed a lot of illegal software, but THIS was much more. Such task of getting the game running was one of the craziest and comparable only to game modding hassle, while in fact it was a brand new legal DVD! Then again, it doesn't say that the game is compatible with Vista on the box, so I couldn't even return the game saying that it does not work as promised...
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Now comes the best part: when I posted above written topic on official Atari Europe Fahrenheit forums I got banned from the forum without explanation and the post itself was deleted! This is how Atari treats its customers. I wrote emails to various addresses in Atari with complaints and explanation of the issue, but within more than a week received no response. Game is good, but Atari does not respect its customers.