the dreaded black screen

[tasunkawitko]

alright guys - help me through this before my withdrawl pains kick in. and please (i am asking this with respect), no condescending remarks about how old DF1 is, how no one plays it anymore etc. thanks in advance.

Here's the deal - CD was destroyed last November, and between moving, new job etc. it wasn't until now that I finally replaced it. I have DSL at our new place, so I went through the procedures of opening up firewall ports for Df as instructed on the novalogic site.

Unfortunately, when I went to connect to novaworld, it would not let me do so. I got an error message stating that it cannot connect to the URL. Looking for an answer, I did some digging around and found something called the DF1 pinger, and from there learned of a new patch, which seems to have updated my program to direct to the correct url to novaworld's lobby. The link below will elaborate, if you are interested:

http://novalogic.com/download/NLExePatcher.exe

problem now is that, even though I can now get the lobby, I can't seem to join a game as I am getting the dreaded black screen with nothing after that. Not sure if this is firewall-related or not, but according to the instructions at novaworld, that should be all good.

the game version reads as: 1.00.03.01P - (what's up with the P?). i have an external DSL modem and as far as i know, no router. i have set the firewall ports to whatever number specified on novalogic's site. i've tried shutting off the firewall and as far as i can tell, that hasn't helped either.

i can see games in the lobby such as SCAR free for all etc., but only get a black screen when i try to join them. i tried hosting a game, but no one joined, so i don't know if i am actually hosting them or not.

any other ideas?

thanks.....