Wide World of Animals for Windows v1.0 ----------------------------------------- Thank you for installing Wide World of Animals. This file contains tips that can help Wide World of Animals run more smoothly on your computer. Do you need to update your video driver? ----------------------------------------- Wide World of Animals does some remarkable things with your video card. Sometimes this causes problems with older video drivers. This is true even if the problem doesn't seem to be related to how the program looks. Examples of video driver-related problems are: "Potentially Fatal Error" or "General Protection Fault," especially those that make reference to your video driver (something.DRV), movies or photos that are black, colors that don't look right, or even a program crash without an error message. If you are encountering a problem like this, the first step is to upgrade your video driver. For information on many video card manufacturers, see the end of this file. If you have a Diamond Speed Star Plus video board --------------------------------------------------- Diamond no longer supports this video board. If Wide World of Animals does not run properly on your computer, contact Diamond at 408-325-7000 for information about obtaining an upgrade. You may also contact Diamond on CompuServe at 75300,3673. Please do not contact Creative Wonders Technical Support regarding your video board. If you have a Diamond Speed Star Pro video board --------------------------------------------------- Check the date on your video driver. If it's older than 2/17/94, follow the instructions above to update the driver. If you have a Diamond Stealth 32 video board --------------------------------------------------- You may notice problems running Wide World of Animals in 24-bit mode (millions of colors). The program works fine in other color modes (hundreds or thousands of colors). If you have a Spider Tarantula Lite video board --------------------------------------------------- You may notice problems running Wide World of Animals in 800 x 600 or 1280 x 1024 resolution at 256 colors. The program works fine in all other screen resolutions and color modes. At the time of production no Win 95 drivers were available from Spider for testing. If you have a Paradise Bali video board --------------------------------------------------- If you are running in 8-bit mode (256 colors), you may notice some corruption of the screen graphics if you start Wide World of Animals more than one time without restarting your computer. This problem does not occur in 16- or 32-bit depths (thousands or millions of colors). Wide World of Animals memory requirements --------------------------------------------------- If you have an 8 megabyte computer and are running Windows 3.1 or 3.11, Wide World of Animals also requires a swap file of at least 5 megabytes. This is usually present in the Windows default setting. If you have very little disk space left, or you have changed your swap file size so that it's smaller than 5 megabytes, use the Virtual Memory applet in the Control Panel to arrange for a swap file. See your Windows documentation for more information. If you are running Windows 95, simply have Windows control the swap file size, the default setting of Windows 95. To have Windows control the swap file size, go into Control Panels, select System and view the 'performance' section of the control panel. Select the 'virtual memory' button and verify that Windows is set to control the swap file size. Printing on a network? --------------------------------------------------- If you are having trouble printing from Wide World of Animals and you're running from a network, check your printer timeout setting. Some of the charts in Wide World of Animals take quite a long time to print (they're complicated!), and sometimes the network gives up before the program is done. We recommend a timeout setting of at least 75 seconds. See your network documentation for more information. Printer memory problems? --------------------------------------------------- If your printer has less than 3 megabytes installed, you may run out of printer memory when sending multiple or large print jobs to it (you may see an 'Error 20' printer memory overflow message). This does not mean that Wide World of Animals is incompatible with your printer. Simply wait for one print job to finish before starting another or raise the installed printer memory amount for larger, more complex print jobs, such as some of the highly detailed and colorful globes present in Wide World of Animals. Printing problem with Line Charts and Ranked Lists? --------------------------------------------------- Some computers have trouble printing the small flags on the Line Charts and Ranked Lists in the Country Statistics area of Wide World of Animals. If you are having this problem, switch to a 256-color (8-bit) video mode and try again. The problem occurs because of an incompatibility with some video drivers running in thousands of colors (16-bit). The print quality is the same whether running in 256 or thousands of colors. Experiencing sound dropouts? --------------------------------------------------- If you are experiencing sound dropouts in Wide World of Animals, you may need to increase the buffer setting in the MCI Wave control device. The default is usually 4 seconds, and may need to be raised to 6-9 seconds. You may experience some slow-down in performance with high buffer settings (8 or 9 seconds). Follow the directions below to change your buffer settings : Windows 3.1 or 3.11 - Open 'Control Panels' in the Main program group. Open 'Drivers' and select 'MCI Sound,' then hit 'settings.' This will bring up a slider bar that will allow you to change the buffer setting. Windows 95 - Open the 'Multimedia' Control Panel. Go to the 'Advanced' page and double click on 'Media Control Devices.' Double click on 'Wave Audio Device (Media Control)' and hit the 'Settings' button. This will bring up a slider bar that will allow you to change the buffer setting. Contacting video card manufacturers --------------------------------------------------- For your convenience, we have included a current list of video card manufacturers along with their phone numbers on the Wide World of Animals CD. The file is called 'vidcards.txt' and lists popular video card manufacturers, their main phone number, a toll free number, and bulletin board number if available.