Jel 37 Posted October 18, 2009 With users having updated to newer systems and graphics cards many have fallen foul of the dreaded 7217 error and have given up on EAW. Facts. The 7217 error message is EAW generated. It is not a windows or operating system error. It only applies to selection menu screens which are in a Microprose compressed format. It occurs particularly with nVidia cards and drivers which no longer support 8 bit in 640 x 480 screen resolution. The eaw exe checks to see if the card and driver can support 8 bit in 640 x 480 screen resolution, and if not is programmed to exit with the 7217 error message. It happens in XP and earlier operating systems. I have my HDDs in caddies. When I had my last nVidia card I got the 7217 error when my XP HDD was loaded. I did not get it when my Vista 32 bit, or Windows 7 (32 or 64) HDDs were operating, so somehow these operating systems fix the problem. It does not happen with Radeon cards. Other solutions: The eaw 1.28b exe has a 7217 fix. The code has been changed to trick the exe into believing thet 8 bit is supported. This means that EAW will run on nVidia series 6 cards such as my old 6600 GT. Although the 7217 error is circumvented, later series of nVidia cards give "screen tearing" in XP, which makes selection impossible. Crashin' Jack found by accident that modifying the exe to work with 1024x708 screens fixed the garbled target/home base selection map problem. Further tests show that it also solves the screen tearing problem an a number of cards, but unfortunately not all of them. We are blissfully unaware of how or why this change fixes the problem, because no changes in code have been made, just changes of values of 640 to 1024 and 480 to 768. Clearly this is a graphic card/driver issue. We will be releasing a modified 1.28C with a number of 1024x768 menus and screens when 1.28C is released officially in the next couple of weeks. Jel Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
