Forum Discussion

addaxesol's avatar
addaxesol
Seasoned Novice
4 months ago
Solved

Black screen and crashed Win 11 Home

Sure, got a cheap computer but everything else works just fine?!
Specs:
ASUS TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS WIFI II
AMD Ryzen 5 5500
ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 EVO OC
Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz 16GB
Kingston NV3 SSD 1TB

Yeah, I simply can’t play Star Wars: The Old Republic because I get a permanent black screen every time I try to launch the game or click Play in the launcher. The screen goes black, and neither Alt+Enter nor Ctrl+Alt+Delete works — no command seems to get me out of the black screen. Restarting the computer or doing a hard shutdown by cutting the power doesn’t help either, as the screen remains black until I boot into the recovery tool and restore the OS to a previous restore point. That’s the only thing that works! … At one point I even reinstalled Windows, but it’s the same story all over again.

I had planned to try the fix of tweaking the client setting-file, which seems to work for most people with similar issues, but since I can’t launch the game at all, I don’t get a client_settings.ini file.

So far, I've run it through Steam. Maybe I should try a direct installation, though I'm **bleep** tired of restoring my OS. 

Other games I play are working fine. I’ve double-checked the drivers for pretty much everything I can think of, so everything is up to date.

Would be fun to get SWTOR running, especially since my son wants us to play it together.

Any ideas?

bug
technical issues
  • addaxesol's avatar
    addaxesol
    4 months ago

    Now it's finally solved!

    Been playing for some hours tonight without any further problems. After a while I didn't even recall I played in windowed mode, especially since I enabled the "Automatically hide the taskbar" function in Windows.

    Since I didn't want to risk it again – having to repair Windows again, I gathered all information on tweaking the client settings file, playing windowed. Then I put it all together (and double checking it) assisted by ChatGPT, creating a .bat file to automatically create the path and set up the client settings file for me. 

    If someone else want to use it, or have a look out of curiosity, it's all here for view and/or download: (Google Drive). There's also a README to help you along using this fix, as well as if one would like to change the .bat file in some way.

8 Replies

  • proxos666's avatar
    proxos666
    Hero+
    4 months ago

    plug a different monitor to launch the game and create the client setting file , the issue will lay with the monitor edid most likley

    otherwise look at the listed possible resolutions in nvidia app and delete resolutions not supported by the monitor

  • addaxesol's avatar
    addaxesol
    Seasoned Novice
    4 months ago

    Okay. Well, what really puzzles me, and is a real pain in the behind, is that Windows won't go back to normal after I quit the game (restart the computer). If only a reboot would get rid of the black screen I'd tweak and test much more freely. As it is now, I dread it ...

    But I guess creating the client setting file is a good way to start. At least that would perhaps make me able to reach into the game and try tweaking the settings further from there. Though, I don't really know it's contents, part from those suggested to be turned from true to false.

    If I could get hold of the rest, would that function to rip from any, or do I need specifications specific for my hardware setup?

  • addaxesol's avatar
    addaxesol
    Seasoned Novice
    4 months ago

    I found this I think I'd might try to use this for a first try on a manually created client settings file ...?

    [Renderer]
    AllowD3D9=True
    AllowD3D11=False
    FullScreen=false
    WindowX=100
    WindowY=100
    Height=768
    Width=1024
    NativeHeight=1080
    NativeWidth=1920
    RefreshRate=60
    VerticalSyncState=false

  • addaxesol's avatar
    addaxesol
    Seasoned Novice
    4 months ago

    Yay! I got the suggestion to try to roll back to NVIDIA-driver to the 566.36 version and also add compability mode for Windows 7 for both launcher.exe and swtor.exe. Solved it just like that. Can now play it in Fullscreen with prefered graphics. 

  • addaxesol's avatar
    addaxesol
    Seasoned Novice
    4 months ago

    Nay! False alarm. It crashed later on, same thing again. I'll try a manually fixed client settings file next.

  • addaxesol's avatar
    addaxesol
    Seasoned Novice
    4 months ago

    Thanks!

    It's a 1920 x 1080. Also set the Nvidia output fixed to 1920 x 1080 by 60Hz as that seems like a good base for having a go at SWTOR without more unnecessary issues. 

  • addaxesol's avatar
    addaxesol
    Seasoned Novice
    4 months ago

    Now it's finally solved!

    Been playing for some hours tonight without any further problems. After a while I didn't even recall I played in windowed mode, especially since I enabled the "Automatically hide the taskbar" function in Windows.

    Since I didn't want to risk it again – having to repair Windows again, I gathered all information on tweaking the client settings file, playing windowed. Then I put it all together (and double checking it) assisted by ChatGPT, creating a .bat file to automatically create the path and set up the client settings file for me. 

    If someone else want to use it, or have a look out of curiosity, it's all here for view and/or download: (Google Drive). There's also a README to help you along using this fix, as well as if one would like to change the .bat file in some way.

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