SpaceSimCentral

Hiya all.Sorry to make my first post a question but I'm not very PC literate at all Having played and loved Frontier on the Amiga in my youth, I stumbled upon this game and have got to say how impressed I am with the look of it....truly amazing. However, I have no idea how to make the game run I have downloaded Alpha 11 and ran the pioneer.exe file but comes up with 'Error:OpenGL extensionARB_vertex_buffer_object not supported. Pioneer can not run on your graphics card'.Do I need a new graphics card? I think it's a 512mb ATIThanks

I think that message says that your card/driver does not support shaders or your are using wrong drivers.What is your graphic card?

Chances are you just need up-to-date drivers. Can't say without knowing the exact graphics card model but if it's 512MB I would expect it to be new enough to support OpenGL 1.5 spec, which is from 2003

Apologies if you're not completely PC illiterate but go here [url]http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html[/url] and download CPUz "1.57 Setup, English" (link is on the right), install it then run it and go to the tab labelled "graphics". Then tell us what the GPU name is :)It might just be that you need to install newer drivers from the manufacturer.Welcome to the site by the way!

Thanks for the responses. I have just downloaded that program and it seems I was mistaken. The graphics card I have is a 256mb ATI Radeon 9200 LE.Any advice where to go from here? Thanks for your patience.

It looks, after some google-fu, that it *might* support it, but you'll probably need the latest drivers.I'm reading between the lines a bit here, but if you're PC is running Windows XP 32-bit, and it's a desktop machine (i.e. not a laptop) then this is probably the right link for the latest driver for that card: [url]http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/radeon-prer300-xp.aspx[/url] if it's a laptop, and the official driver support for Ati laptop drivers was really bad for older laptops, you could try [url]http://www.omegadrivers.net/[/url] of warning about that second link though, you will need to do a bit more careful reading about what your card is and what drivers you'll need.If you tell me a bit more about your machine I'll try to help you a bit more, but otherwise that first link should be the right one. You can always double check by starting here and just following the drop down boxes: [url]http://support.amd.com/US/GPUDOWNLOAD/Pages/index.aspx[/url] forget to let us know how it goes!Andy

Thanks so much for all your help guys.I downloaded that ATI Centre thing and updated my drivers (never knew you had to do that so don't think they had been updated since I got them years ago) and the game is working now.Only had a quick try of it but it looks amazing! It brought back so many fond memories of Frontier on the Amiga but what an improvement on it - everyone involved seriously needs to be massively proud of what they have achieved so far.Thanks again for the help

Okay, that's great -- I looked at the 9200 specs on Wikipedia and it says OpenGL support is only 1.3. Good thing I didn't tell you to go buy a new one