Mass Effect 1 on Win 8 Notebook

[Hobbyman75]

Hello all

My problem is that after I installed Mass Effect from its physical copy and the 1.02 patch and the BDtS DLC I still can't play since the game crashes after the "Press Any Key" screen.

I have recently bought a new HP Pavillion g6 2220 Notebook, with Windows 8 an Intel Core i5-3210M CPU, 6 GB of RAM and the Intel HD Graphics 4000 display adapter.

From what I have gathered in various forums, the problem most likely is the onboard Intel HD 4000 GPU which is not supported by Mass Effect so:

1. If the GPU is the problem, is there ANY way to play Mass Effect on this Notebook?

2. If the GPU is not the problem, then what might be the problem?

Thank you

[Gorath_the_Elder]

You are asking for information on an EA sponsored forum to try to do something that they didn't want done.  The reasons for that are extensive, but the root of it is Intel's antipathy to games, game players, and to game publishers.  They expect the companies to write games to suit what they are doing, instead of making video solutions that are the standard for games. 

Laptops such as the one you bought aren't built to play games on.  They cannot dispose of the heat, and they can't continue running normally when they get too hot too often.  They die much sooner than properly designed systems with proper gaming graphics and sufficient cooling power included, if you game with them. 

Of course, there are unofficial tricks and deceits in plenty, including on sites suopported by Intel, that enable you to bypass the builtin safeguards, and purposely choose to damage the laptop doing what it's not supposed to do.  And then claim it's this game's fault that you did anything so destructive.  You really think we ought to tell you what those workarounds are, here, on a game publisher's site? 

I don't think so.

[Hobbyman75]

A simple "No you can't" would suffice.

I didn't ask for some "unethical" or "immoral" solution to this problem. An acceptable solution could also be installing a new stand-alone ATI or nVidia video card to my laptop, if that is possibe.

Thank you.

[Gorath_the_Elder]

Laptops haven't been assembled with removable / replaceable graphics in several years.  The last ones were Sager's, about 2008 or 2009.  Sorry. 

[LordRockySR2]

To get it to work on my Win 8 Machine (MacBook Pro, Late 2010) I changes the properties of the masseffect.exe file to run in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP3. It works just fin now! (Though with the Steam version, the Steam Overlay will not come up while running in compatibility mode for some reason...)

[5ko_SK]

Are you running ME as Administrator? If no, you should try

[Fred_vdp]

The problem is indeed the Intel HD graphics chipset and as Gorath pointed out, you can't upgrade graphics hardware in laptops.

Some players have been able to at least launch the Mass Effect sequels, but with horrible graphical artifacts. Mass Effect 1 is graphically more demanding than its sequels.