These two questions are for nvidia card owners only.

What nvidia drivers have you got? and have you had any trouble from the drivers while playing CM GM edition?

I ask because Yesterday I downloaded nvidia's 186.18 drivers and installed them and when I opened the game The mouse pointer kept locking into place for a few seconds. I changed my chess set to a 3D animated one and the game practically locked up in the middle of the operation. After waiting for yonks to see if it would clear, I had to switch off at the power button to get my system going again. Eventually I was able to get back to the 3D wood set I'd been using before, but the pieces were mostly blocks of shadow. I swapped back to nvidia's 175.19 drivers and I'm having NO trouble whatever, even with the animated set!

I have an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT... I'm not using the latest drivers from NVIDIA's website (I get mine from my laptop's manufacturer); but I've never had any video-related issues with Chessmaster.

I am having a similar problem. The new nVidia drivers wouldn't work properly.

I'm running Windows 7 RC x64 and my graphics card is a Geforce 7950 GT. Version of GM seems to be 1.2.0. (in the Help->About chessmaster... screen)

From the start:
When trying to start the game, the window would simply be competly black. (The window where you select game mode or something, the very first screen after the anoying long intro movie.)
If I click in the upper rigth corner I can get exit menu to appear and close the game, but if I click where the icons normally where, the game seems to hang (I can no longer exit the game).

After reading the faq, something was said about Aero, so this have been disabled all the time.

After hearing about the ini file (also here) I found that if "Only2DBoards" was set to true, then the game will work just as it should.
But all the fancy 3D which I liked is now gone... (or rather, an ugly 2D board which I really don't like have appeared...)

The driver used at the time was 190.38. Trying a much older driver worked. I have now tried several drivers and the isue appears to start with 182.50. [driver info, release notes are there too somewhere...]
(I have tried both vista x64 and win7 x64 drivers, though they are combined from 186 and up.)
Well, so much for the "update you drivers" troubleshooting...

But I think I once saw a bug like that while using winxp, but I'm not sure... I remember at least downgrading my drivers at some point though it migth not be related to this.


I really hate the 2D boards, so this is quite anoying for me. (I guess it is because they don't look like a normal chess board.)
You might say I could just use the old driver, however the old win7 driver is beta and is rather buggy... (random BSODs, not only when running games.) So I really don't want to use those...

(btw KHollister, you have a laptop? They have other drivers of some reason. I don't think that is the reason you don't experience any problems though.)

(sigh, I'm writing way to much...)

Yes, the latest NVIDIA drivers don't work properly -- I seem to recall the same thing happened with the first drivers that came out for Windows Vista as well.

At this point, your only option is to roll back to an older driver or get used to 2D sets -- they may be different, but they aren't too bad...

The only caveat about Aero was that the opening in the Status Bar was obscured. Other than that, there's no problems.

As far as Windows 7 is concerned; it may be a Release Candidate; but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bug free. There aren't many official drivers for it either; which is why I haven't installed it yet.

The driver I'm using on my laptop is an official NVIDIA driver... it's not the latest driver (as I mentioned), but I've never had any video problems.

There was quite a difference between xp and vista and therefore there was a lot of trouble with the drivers in general. win7 is quite similar to vista and vista drivers work fine on win7. (there is no win7 drivers out there after all, nvidia is one of the few exceptions)
The nvidia vista driver works fine on win7 too, the only difference that I know of is that vista uses directx10, win7 directx11.

Secondly, it is the fifth WHQL-Certified win7 driver. But I doubt the driver is the real isue actually.


And yes, the RC has at least one bug. If you search in an indexed place after data stored in the extended meta data (like "tags:dogs"), it cannot find anything.
But since reverting drivers to an older version works, I would say the chance of the isue being the OS is slim.


The point about yours being a laptop model is that nvidia release two versions, a desktop version and a laptop version. I don't really know why, but since they are not the same, the isue could maybe be limited to one of them.
But second reason I doubt it is the driver; if it really was an isue, why does it only affect two guys when nvidia cards are pretty normal? (and in two different ways, i.e. it is not the same bug.)


I found the old memory of the time where I downgraded the drivers for the first time. The problem was removed support some rare mode or something that a few old CPUs had and this chrashed some OpenGL games.

Maybe this could be a similar isue. Because of a specific hardware configuration it wouldn't work.
In order words, if the support have been removed, a newer driver still wouldn't work. At least 6 drivers have been made after the problem arised, wouldn't it have been fixed now if it was a bug they wanted to fix? Okay, maybe not...


Anyway, you are rigth, I will have to live with the 2D boards.
And just got a good idea. I have a small mobile chess computer with small pieces. But because it can't move the pieces itself, it tells me how to move them.
So I will take my chess set, place it by the monitor and replicate the 2D board there. See, a real chessboard instead of some bad computer 3D. I should really have thought about this before...

Solved! In Preferences>Board Settings, disable Bump Mapping.

I installed CM10 for comparison and noticed that the same setting is greyed-out (unselectable), but looks and plays fine if you use OpenGL instead of DirectX. This same setting can be turned on in CM11 by opening the cm.ini file in notepad and changing the OpenGL setting to 1.

Shame about the lack of full-screen and antialiasing, as many have stated before.

Thanks for the information!