X: Beyond The Frontier works on Windows XP

[X-Traderman]

I have just got started in X after getting BTF from steam. For a game claiming to be like Elite, I think 3.50 is worth a gamble.

I played it on Windows 2003 (server version of XP) for about 27 hours. On my first forays outside of Seizewell, the game started to crash. Then it started doing the freezing and sound looping thing. It could not be fixed no matter what - reinstalling the game was no use. I had to ask myself why did it worked for 27 hours then ? I made no changes to the PC because I was busy playing.

I set up virtual machines using VMware Player running XP Pro and Windows 7 Pro. The game crashed in them exactly the same. That eliminated any codec problems as these were fresh installs and had totally different set of codecs. They couldn't all be failing.

I was running on nVidia GTS250. I had this card for years and never had any problems with it. So I put a second card nVidia 8500GT in the system and ran the game on that. The crashing problem was fixed. With the lower end card set to be primary, all the crashing virtual machines were fixed also.

In conclusion, to play BTF on XP or anything else, a low end graphics card is needed. Even though GTS250 is very low end already, but it is still too high end for BTF.

Both cards were using the same nVidia driver - I didn't need to install anything when adding the second card. BTF was doing something funny to one card but not the other.

Anyway, this post is to clear up on various claims that BTF wouldn't work on XP. I almost accepted that as truth and thought I was going to throw BTF out the window. Now I am happy I didn't. I can see this game keeping me going for quite a while.

[X2-Illuminatus]

In conclusion, to play BTF on XP or anything else, a low end graphics card is needed. Even though GTS250 is very low end already, but it is still too high end for BTF.

That's not true. You can play XBTF just fine on Windows XP. You do not need a low end graphics card for that.

Anyway, this post is to clear up on various claims that BTF wouldn't work on XP.

I read about these claims now for the first time.