M&M VI grey screen issue

Hi.

Anyone know how to get M&M VI - Mandate of Heaven working on a Win7 64-bit machine?

The intro movie plays and works fine, but when the menu screen comes up it's just a grey screen with a mouse cursor. Music plays in the background but it's all grey. I press F4 and it changes to a windowed mode, as long as I have 16-bit color enabled. Well, the windowed version shows the menu screen, but when I click anything on it it just freezes while the music keeps playing or a voice talks, etc.

Very weird. I hope i can get this working because i really want to check it out.

Any ideas?

Yep, add -nomovie to the command line and it'll skip the opening videos that are causing the hangup.

Also, you may know this, but never allow games to install to the Program Files directories. It just opens a big can of worms and not the gummy kind.

The opening movies work fine, that's not the problem. They actually play great and look good, it's when the movie is over and the menu screen is supposed to be there. The menu instead is just a grey screen.

I somewhat have it working, by enabling the game to play in 640x480 resolution. Unfortunately, this creates a small box that the game plays in, but if I change my desktop resolution to 800x600, it is large enough to play and seems to work fine.

If I try to play in fullscreen mode, though, the grey screen comes back. Sometimes my display driver even crashes and restarts. Weird.

Thanks for the response by the way.

Fluent said:

If I try to play in fullscreen mode, though, the grey screen comes back. Sometimes my display driver even crashes and restarts. Weird.

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I had this with one of the recent NVIDIA drivers. With the last update (350.12) it vanished and I can play in fullscreen again. By the way do you have the greyface patch? It repairs many issues.

Hi bkrueger. I did download the greyface patch, but the issue remained. I'm pretty sure I have the latest Nvidia drivers. I recently updated them to a version that optimized GTA V, and I'm pretty sure that is the latest Nvidia driver available, since the program that came with my new computer didn't prompt an update. I'll have to check the version number as I'm on my laptop downstairs right now.

Did you do anything else to get the game to run in fullscreen? I had to turn off every effect in the Nvidia Control Panel just to get the intro movie to run smoothly to even get to the menu screen. Any other tips that you have that may have solved the problem would be greatly welcome.

Thanks for the response, too.

P.S. When you updated to the latest drivers, did you use Driver Cleaner or anything special? Or did you just use the Nvidia Experience program?

A-ha! It works if I disable Nvidia Shadowplay. Strange.

I guess if I want to record footage from the game, I have to play in a windowed version and adjust my desktop resolution. If I just want to play fullscreen I have to disable Shadowplay.

Should be good going forward. Yeehaw.

Maybe also check the in-game graphics options. IIRC, by default, MM6 did not even have proper hardware acceleration but was purely powered by a software renderer. See if you can turn on Direct3D or anything in the options. I might be confusing MM6 with MM7 but I'm pretty sure that you could enable some level of hardware acceleration either in both games or just in no. 7.
With hardware enabled, ShadowPlay should probably work. Worth a try at least...

There are no real options for that in M&M VI, unless I'm missing something.

Maybe if I change something in Nvidia control panel? But what, though?

Wow. Sometimes I really surprise myself. After countless trial and error, I actually figured out that M&M VI does not respond well to the status indicators from Shadowplay.

Here's the thing. With the FPS counter in the top left of the screen, the grey screen happens. Turn that off, and the game actually plays fine, until you try to record. What happens then? The recording indicator turns green in the top right of the screen, and the game becomes extremely choppy and unplayable. So, turn off both indicators and the game runs smooth as butter, fullscreen and the best part is, when I record, it records flawlessly, albeit without any indicator telling me I'm recording.

I honestly can't believe I figured this out. Aye carumba, man. Computers and gaming can be so strange sometimes. Hope this helps someone in the future who has this issue.

I have replayed M&M6 more than any other game I own; it's always a fun experience.

I'm super impressed with it thus far. The party creation alone is a thing of beauty.

I am playing MM VII because I like it slightly better than MM VI, which is next on my playlist.

Why do I like VII better? It's just the challenge of needing two promotions to get access to the parties full power. I think 6 is something like novice, expert, master. 7 is Normal, Expert, Master, Grandmaster. I love things like that.

I love things like that, too.

I think I started with VI based on a recommendation from someone and really haven't explored the series enough yet. I'll either play VII next or World of Xeen, which I also heard is great.

Glad that the game is working now and looking nice on my 32" display. "Nice" being entirely subjective, of course.

crpgnut said:

I am playing MM VII because I like it slightly better than MM VI, which is next on my playlist.

Why do I like VII better? It's just the challenge of needing two promotions to get access to the parties full power. I think 6 is something like novice, expert, master. 7 is Normal, Expert, Master, Grandmaster. I love things like that.

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The reason that makes VII bad compared to VI was the world which was much worse and smaller, and especially the dungeons which were super tiny and bland, whereas VI's were huge and very complex and had tons of stuff to do. The starting dungeon is bigger than the final dungeon of almost any other RPG.

VI to me is the best game ever, I would almost want to live in that world.