Technical Just built a new computer, WotLK client crashes on startup.

[ValhaLLa82]

I played wotlk succesfully on my old computer. I decided to build a new gaming rig, and now the client crashes on startup. I've tried retorrenting/reinstalling etc. all the usual stuff.

The crash goes like this, I start the client and get frozen black screen with tons of window resizing and my 2nd monitor goes a bit crazy, followed by a very loud unpleasant high pitched sound. Then it tries to play the game trailer but is frozen at the start. If I hit esc it goes black again and then eventually gets to a frozen cursor over the EULA agreement you get when you first run the game. Can't get past that.

It feels like a resolution issue because of all of the resizing, but I changed my monitor to 1280x1024 and a few other settings and the problem persists. Is there a way to run the game in windowed mode without needing to get into the menu to set it to windowed first? I'd really like to try that. Other than that, I'm out of ideas.

The system is windows 10, The important specs are:

processor: i7
video cards: 2x GTX 980 ti

Thanks

[Kemii]

Go int your WTF folder and change the following lines within your Config file.

SET readTOS "1"
SET readEULA "1"
SET gxResolution "1920x1080"
SET gxWindow "1"
SET gxMaximize "1"

This will get you past the TOC and EULA screens, put the client on your primary window in 1920x1080 and Borderless Fullscreen mode. You can change the resolution numbers to whatever your native desktop resolution is.

[ValhaLLa82]

Thanks, I'll try that shortly.

[ValhaLLa82]

Okay, so doing that gets me a lot further. Now I am on a frozen login screen, but with music playing and heres the odd thing, I can press buttons like "Quit" and "Log in" they will work, its just the screen is frozen the whole time. I had a similar problem with Dota 2 and the solution ended up being running it in DirectX11 instead of DirectX12. Is there a way to disable DirectX 12 for the wotlk client?

[Kemii]

Okay, so doing that gets me a lot further. Now I am on a frozen login screen, but with music playing and heres the odd thing, I can press buttons like "Quit" and "Log in" they will work, its just the screen is frozen the whole time. I had a similar problem with Dota 2 and the solution ended up being running it in DirectX11 instead of DirectX12. Is there a way to disable DirectX 12 for the wotlk client?

DX12 does not have any compatibility for WOTLK client you can try adding the following line to your config file SET gxApi "d3d9", if that doesnt work you will need to go into your Nvidia setting and then open a Program Specific build and see if you can get it to run off dx9.

[Pooppickle]

the issue is definitely related to windows 10, i sure hope that isn't a skylake i7 because if it isn't you can run a better OS like 7 or 8.1 on a VM for older games they will run more reliably & have less startup issues.

i'd say just upgrade the whole system to 7 or 8.1 but if you have 2 980 ti's (fukin hell man) you're probably looking to play those dx12 games too..

[Anyone0]

Wotlk client should use DirectX 9 by default on Windows and the only other option is OpenGL, which should be slower. It does not support other versions of DirectX. You might not have the required version of DirectX 9 installed but on my laptop it was running fine right after installing Windows 10. Other possibilites are graphics cards driver problems or the fact that you have 2 graphics cards.

Other things that you could try in config file instead of ' SET gxApi "d3d9" ':

SET gxApi "d3d9ex"
- Graphics engine that was experimental in wotlk and added as default in cata. Works better for me on Windows 7 but not sure if it affects login screen and it still uses DirextX 9.

SET gxApi "opengl"
- You can try changing to OpenGL to see if DirectX is what causes the problem.