My nephew purchaseded Morrowind and wants to play it on his old computer, which I gave to his mom many years ago. He tried to run the program and got an error message that MORROWIND caused an invalid page fault in module MORROWIND.EXE at 0167:0069ca6 (with further codes under registers and stack dump)


It is a Dell with a Celeron 430 processor, 64 MB RAM and an ATI Rage Pro APG 2X video card; I'm not sure of the CD speed.

I understand that this does not even come close to meeting minimum system requirments(!), but I'm wondering if we increase the RAM, and get a 32 MB video card, whether Morrowind will run on a Celeron 430 processor--even if not optimally.

Of course, a new computer would be ideal, but money is a bit tight right now.

Thanks for any feedback

The least I've sucessfully ran Morrowind on is
350mhz P2
128mb ram
Geforce2 MX/200 (32mb)
cdrom speed doesn't matter since the entire game is installed to the hard disk. The most important this is to get a faster graphics card, then meebe double the amount of ram you have. That shouldn't cost too much; $50 at most for a Geforce4MX, and maybe $20-30 for more ram. A new cpu won't run you too much, maybe $30-40 for a 600mhz P3, if the Celeron isn't enough.

The game runs slow on any system

As far as I can tell, the very most important thing to the performance of morrowind is the cpu, for all that AI and physics junk. A Celeron 430 was never really a good cpu...It competed pretty close with an AMD K6-3. You could most likely get a Pentium III 1Ghz really cheap, and those things overclock like hell so you can get your moneys worth and run morrowind easily.

Second thing would obviously be the ram, I'd say at least 256mbs, more if you can, to run the game as smooth as possible, especially since with an earilier cpu you can't use ddr or rd-ram or anything remotely fast.

The graphics card absolutely has to be upgraded, but not by too much. Get a direct x 7 card or something, since morrowind really only needs that. The only direct x 8 thing about morrowind is the water and it looks like crap anyways IMO. Just get a relatively fast card capable of hardware T&L, cheap cards that could run morrowind nicely would be radeon 9000 or 9200, geforce 2,3,4 and fx 5200. Try and stay away from 64-bit memory on those cards (ie. radeon 9200se, cheaper geforce 2 mx's, some fx 5200's, etc.)

A system like that wouldnt be up to date by any means but should be able to run morrowind no problem, at least as well as the game is capable of running. Tweaking and overclocking always helps a bunch too.

As others have said, 256mb bare minimum so far as RAM is concerned. I tried running Morrowind on 128, and it was unplayable. Slowdown, freeze-ups, Balmora took like 2 minutes to load... soon as it got upgraded to 294 it was playable.

I'd suggest a 64MB graphics card if you can possibly get one. The processor might just about be ok... I don't really think processors have much effect on gameplay with Morrowind.

a 128 mb graphics card costs around 70 euros a amd athlon k7 1800 mhz is 150
a ram print is about 50 euros (for 64 mb ) a new board is between 100 and 600 euros depents on what u want a new hd is 125

25 euros for installing the gear and there u go

its the 3d card that makes mw go slow and the ram i play with 1024 ram and even then it freezes up sometimes the graphics card is 128 mb v-ram

I've done some more benchmarking, and I'm agreeing that Morrowind has the most outrageously inefficient engine ever. It seems that the only difference between Morrowind on a 350mhz P2 with a Geforce2, and Morrowind on a Athlon 2400 with a GeforceFX is maybe MAYBE twice the view distance, and the ability to run at 1152x864 instead of 800x600. Damnation........ I'd like to try Morrowind on the Blue Mountain supercomputer sometime... I might be able to run at 1600x1200, and get 75% visibility, average. Maybe. Great game, very detailed content, but awful, awful engine.