General Troubleshooting
This page describes how to find support for various problems with Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast. Topics include installation, Windows NT, assertion errors and performance issues.
The official address for reporting problems with Baldur's Gate is Customer Support at [email protected]. Refer here for more information.
If you attempt to do a full install, you may notice that you get a message telling you that there isn't enough disk space, even if you have more than enough space free. This is because Install Shield cannot fathom a hard drive greater than 2 GB. Simply choose the option to continue the install and you'll have no problems. The minimum install is about 300 MB while the full install is approximately 2.4 GB.
If the installer is crashing before finishing copying all the files, follow the steps listed at Interplay's Support Site.
Do not install Baldur's Gate in a root directory such as "D:\". You will likely get Assertion Failed Error 581 when you start up the game. Install the game into a folder.
Some Assertion Errors were fixed in the patch. The majority of Assertion errors seem to arise because the game cannot locate a file that is needed or the file is corrupted. Possible solutions are listed here. The majority of the crashes can be cleared up as explained there by deleting the cache, setting the CD at no read ahead, running a lanse cleaner on the drive and cleaning the CD.
Baldur's Gate will run well under Windows NT as explained in the README.TXT file and by Mark Brockington (Multiplayer Programmer):
If Bioware and/or Interplay were offering technical support on how to run Baldur's Gate under NT4, this is hypothetically what we would tell people. Baldur's Gate requires DirectDraw 2, DirectSound 2 and DirectPlay 5 (DirectPlay 5 fixes a pile of nasty bugs from DirectPlay 3). Thus, on Windows 95 machines, we will be installing DirectX 5, if you don't have it installed on your system. We are using a "developer-only" patch for DirectPlay 5 to test our game on NT4/SP3. On Windows NT machines, NT4/SP3 has DirectX3 support, and SP4 includes DirectPlay 6 support on top of DirectX 3. Thus, SP4 would be really really useful for those people who want to play multiplayer in NT. (In NT4/SP3, no protocols will be available for selection if you do not have DirectPlay 5 support.) If you have no intention of playing multi-player, NT4/SP3 will do just fine.
For Tales of the Sword Coast, you should use Service Pack 5 (SP5) when playing the game under Windows NT, especially in multiplayer mode.
When installing the game or playing it, turn off all TSR
(Terminate and Stay Resident) programs running in the
background like anti-virus software or memory managers. Press
Ctrl-Alt-Delete. The only ones listed that are essential for
Windows are "Explorer" and "Systray". Press End Task to shut
down the others one at a time after selecting them.
As part of the Japanese distribution agreement, Bioware had to put a language lock on the standard North American Baldur's Gate version so it would not run on the Japanese version of Windows 95/98. You must purchase the Japanese version through Sega, although an English version may be available in the future. Alternatively, you could also try switching your Windows language in the Control Panel to U.S. English and then try to run Baldur's Gate.
Baldur's Gate was initially translated with complete voice acting into French, German, Spanish and Italian (only partially translated voice acting). The localized versions are produced by replacing files containing the sound files for spoken dialog and files containing the English text strings. The German version has had its violence censored. Multiplayer games can be held between people using different localized versions as explained by Don Yakielashek (Senior Programmer):
Multiplay between different language versions is not
supported; however, it will work with a few small problems.
Most text is passed between the players as a reference so it
will show up in the appropriate language. There are some cases
however, where text is being composed at game time and is sent
between the machines untranslated. This won't be things like
NPC dialog, but various status messages that will provide
feedback on what is happening.
For instance, another players game could send back a message
of how much damage a NPC received. You would see this message
untranslated.
Luckily since this messages are typically simple you should be able to
understand most of these messages from their structure or context.
For example, the damage message in English is "Drizzt - Damage
Taken (11)".
The game speed can be adjusted by changing the AI Update slider in the BGConfig utility. All players in a multiplayer game must be using the same setting (default=30).
If you have switched to ISDN from using a modem in the past, be sure to uninstall the modem, otherwise Baldur's Gate may crash trying to find it.
If you experience a C++ runtime error during the Gorion cut scene, try turning off the Environmental Audio (EAX) support under Options/Sound.
If you see Assertion Error D:\Dev\Chitin\ChTlkTb1.cpp, try rebooting the machine. This appears to result from a previous copy of the game not exiting correctly.
As explained in greater detail in the README.TXT file, game performance can be increased by turning off the following options: Weather Effects (Gameplay), Translucent Shadow (Graphics), Character Movement Sounds (Sounds) or other audio. The following will decrease performance: adjusting the Brightness/Contrast (Graphics) [adjust monitor instead], DirectX hardware calls with the BLT options (Graphics) or running the game in windowed mode (Gameplay).
Character names can be up to 20 characters long. More than one character can have the same name. In the single player game, "secondary portraits" have been assigned for each NPC. If you meet an NPC that was supposed to have the portrait selected for your character, the secondary portrait will be used for the NPC which, of course, will not match their description anymore. You cannot change the name of an NPC because this would invalid their recorded dialog. Furthermore, you cannot change the NPC sounds or portraits as this would reduce the integrity of their character.
The number of portraits, exported characters or saved games cannot be more than 255 each. Exceeding this number, will cause crashes. These crashes should be avoided in the patched version of BG because it checks the number.
You will not be able to continue exploring Baldur's Gate after you finish the end game of the main plot. This is because all the dialog for the city of Baldur's Gate would have to be rewritten to take into account your accomplishments. They did not have the time to impliment this as the city accounts for 20% of the entire game. However, the following two things are done:
1) A "final save" is made right before the final battle which can be used to continue playing other subquests.
2) The main character (and any created characters in the multiplayer game) are exported with the additional experience gained in the final battle added to their experience totals. These characters can be used for other multiplayer games or the sequels.
If the game seems to be accessing the hard drive constantly and getting slower than it was before, it may be that the screenshot feature has been enabled as described at the Interplay Support site.
The following gameplay problems are described at the Interplay Support Site:
If you are unable to see Ulgoth's Beard on your Tales of the Sword Coast map after arriving at the town, you may not have updated your map files during installation. You will have to do it manually:
When you install Tales of the Sword Coast, we recommend you accept the
option to automatically convert your saved games. However, if you
don't select this option, you can convert your saved games later using
MCONVERT.EXE which is included in the root of your Tales CD.
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