First ever Direct X 9 error.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Flipping joy! Someone please shoot me. I know I've been pretty lucky with this game, only ever having one problem (the infinite blue loop that eventually got solved), so it figures that my luck would run out with installing the beyond borked Bon Voyage.

Specs:

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ (2.2GHz)
Memory: 2048MB RAM
Page File: 352MB used, 3589MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
(Direct X is reporting no problems found.)
Card name: ATI Radeon X1550
Display Memory: 512.0 MB

First ever Direct X 9 error for me. "Failure to enumerate any Direct X 9 compatible graphics adaptors in this system! Please make sure you have a Direct X 9 compatible graphics adaptor and have installed the latest manufacturer provided driver. Application terminating blah blah blah." Did the obvious first (updating the driver and updating Direct X), but still having this issue. Did some research of my own...unfortunately, the part concerning this in the Sims2Wiki is missing, and everything I turned up dealt with when the game originally came out years ago (outdated graphics cards). Now, my card is supposed to be compatible with this game. It's never failed me yet. It's not technically on the requirements list (falling between the x1300 and x1600 obviously), but it's supposed to be supported.

Anyone got any ideas? Certainly this damn card can't be outdated or incompatible.  Emailed EA about this to get their worthless non-solution.

[J. M. Pescado]

I recommend percussive maintenance.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

From what I just found out, any sort of percussive maintenance should be directed at EAxis.  Apparently, people with this specific card are getting this error, and updating Direct X/drivers doesn't help like it used to.  I am beyond pissed.  I feel like heading over to their headquarters and shoving a few M-80s up Larry Probst's ass.  I just bought this damn card two months ago to relieve myself of the ridiculous blue loop Nvidia shit.

Are there enough people fed up with them willing to start a revolution?

Edit:  Ah, yes.  I got the much anticipated non-solution from some idiot at EA.  First "Roel" thought that I was having issues installing the game, so he gave me the Direct X bypass (which I already knew of) that doesn't work for this issue.  After telling him that, I get a whole "sorry, even though your card should be on the list of supported cards, it's not, so fuck you, we aren't going to help" reply that I was expecting.  I told him that I'm not the only person with this card or this issue and asked him to pass this along to someone for a patch fix (as I've spent hundreds of dollars over the years on their games, so I'd better see a fix for this).

I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Well, "Roel" figures that I corrupted a file while installing.  There is no way in hell that this "file corruption" can be happening to numerous people, but in any case, in case anyone else is having this problem, I'm going to uninstall, try the Direct X workaround on the odd chance that it may fix this (though I doubt it), and I'll report back if anything good happens.

[J. M. Pescado]

From what I just found out, any sort of percussive maintenance should be directed at EAxis.  Apparently, people with this specific card are getting this error, and updating Direct X/drivers doesn't help like it used to.  I am beyond pissed.  I feel like heading over to their headquarters and shoving a few M-80s up Larry Probst's ass.  I just bought this damn card two months ago to relieve myself of the ridiculous blue loop Nvidia shit.

From what I heard, Larry Probst retired or resigned.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Damn, that's too bad because I think I found the reason behind this failure error. 

This is either the work of overzealous sniffing by Secorum, and/or naughty EA decided to put spyware on my PC (via that stupid launcher idea).  I had to uninstall everything, and nothing would still install correctly.  Thinking of Battlefield 2142 and the retarded spyware shit EA included, on a whim, I ran Spybot, and surprise, surprise.  Wiped it out, and things are installing correctly so far.

If Secorum decides to be an asshat again though, I don't know what to do (I don't think even YASU is working in this case) because it's not like I can wipe off my husband's UltraISO and Nero.

[jolrei]

I got exactly the same message re: DirectX 9 not being found.

In my case, the shortcut I was using was incorrectly created.  Test game by starting up directly from the Sims2EP6.exe in your BV sub-directory in program files.  If that works, create a new shortcut to that file.  Not sure how I corrupted the shortcut, but recreating it solved the problem.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

It's working fine now (with no CC of any kind; we'll find out about that in a few minutes).  I'm not so sure it was a "corrupted file" or a bad shortcut.  As I said, I had to wipe out some new spyware (that I swear popped up on my system only after BV), and now everything works correctly.  Strange (but not too strange considering this is EA we're talking about here).

[kacidama]

I've been getting the same message - although I have played BV for 2 weeks (with a few crashes - but I think that is more to do with lack of virtual memory) I cannot load the game at all.
The only difference being that I had recently installed Avast - which I uninstalled and managed to load the game but it froze after 2 minutes of playing (I was in build mode) - now it has reverted to the Directx message.  I tried installing a no-cd crack but am still getting the  same message

Processor: AMD Duron(tm) MMX (1.3GHz)
Memory: 512MB RAM
Page File: 405MB used, 844MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
(Direct X is reporting no problems found.)
Card name: ATI Radeon 9600 Atlantis
Display Memory: 128.0 MB

[Marvin Kosh]

If you've recently installed the latest ATI drivers, I recommend rolling back to an earlier release.  They don't appear to work with the 9600 at all.  I know, I spent the better part of a couple of hours uninstalling display drivers and then re-installing them 

I also recommend actually going to the page for Display in the Dxdiag tool and trying the Direct3D test, because the cursory scan of your graphics driver doesn't actually render anything on screen.