Are you using a joystick?
When I had Tomb Raider freeze at the menu, it was because the game had a conflict with my joystick.

No joystick or gamepad. Just a GF2. It's not a sound conflict either. If I disable sound, I still have the same problem. I tried the demo as well, and the same thing happens.

With a TNT2 M64, it works fine.

Maybe your AGP slot doesn't like Geforce cards. I've seen this happening before. Do you have the latest BIOS for your mobo?

I can rule out the actual PC as being the issue, since Ive tried 4 different Geforce 2MX cards across 3 completely different PCs. a P2, a P3, and a P4, all with the latest BIOS. It's more far more likely that TR1 doesn't like. NVidia Drivers are not a factor either, since this is a DOS game.

I've even tried using nolfb.com in a batch file, in the hope that it might help, but no luck. 🙁

Does it happen in both low and high resolutions? Is there a patch for the game?

Good question. I've only tried it on high resolution, which I think is either 640x480 or 640x400. I'll try and switch to a low res and see if that makes a difference.

As for patches, I can't remember which ones I've tried up to now, but I don't think there's much in the line of official patches for TR1.

Update: Hmm. I can't even access setup.exe with the Geforce 2 card. If I do I just get a black screen and the PC freezes.

Update 2: I have no idea how to switch to low res, withou being able to get to the menu. The moment I reach the main menu after the opening cinematics, it freezes. 🙁

Totempole, it's been a while since I played Tomb Raider 1 on a "fast" retro PC, but I do seem to remember similar problems with Nvidia cards. It would usually hang at the main menu for me. What's the rest of your system like?

I suggest installing the TNT2 M64 back in (or maybe some other card that may even do hardware acceleration for this game) and beating the game. There's probably nothing wrong with your GeForce2 cards and the rest of the system, just Tomb Raider being picky.

IIRC high resolution mode was accessed from a command line. Without it, it ran on low-res by default. Maybe you'll have to use the 3dfx patch along with a Glide wrapper to play it in your system.

Not via command line. I'm pretty sure I pressed one of the F keys to get into high res mode. I wouldn't want to run it in low res anyway, but it moght help me get closer to a solution if it does in fact work in low res mode.

The PC I want to run it on is a PII 450Mhz. Too slow to handle glide wrappers properly.

Edit: I've just realized I've asked about this before about 6 months ago. 😊
Tomb Raider 1 on Geforce 2 MX-400
I never did come right with those glide wrappers though.

Even funnier is the fact that there was the same back and forth between you and filipeto on that thread. 🤣

Pressing F1 switches between VGA and SVGA in Tomb Raider. Totempole, do you own any 3dfx cards? Tomb Raider also had accelerated versions for the PowerVR PCX2, Matrox Mystique and ATi Rage, so you can use those as well.

I have a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card, but it's severely lacking in the D3D department, and compatibility is not great. The Geforce 2 is an extremely compatible card for 90's games, TR1 is the only problem I've come across so far.

Sounds like I just went through exactly the same thing OP went through, sorry to raise an old thread, but I was having the exact same issue with the game freezing up typically at the main menu (or sometimes rarely shortly after getting into the game), with music continuing to play through the CD, requiring a hard reboot. I thought it would be a sound related issue, as im running a PCI sound card with dos drivers, but even with no sound card selected, it still happened. I removed the GeForce 2 GPU and went back to the internal GPU, and now it works flawlessly. Does seem it doesnt like GeForce 2's!

BoozerDawg wrote on 2022-03-22, 00:05:

Sounds like I just went through exactly the same thing OP went through, sorry to raise an old thread, but I was having the exact same issue with the game freezing up typically at the main menu (or sometimes rarely shortly after getting into the game), with music continuing to play through the CD, requiring a hard reboot. I thought it would be a sound related issue, as im running a PCI sound card with dos drivers, but even with no sound card selected, it still happened. I removed the GeForce 2 GPU and went back to the internal GPU, and now it works flawlessly. Does seem it doesnt like GeForce 2's!

Weird right? It even works fine on a TNT2. I was hoping that there would be some sort of quick fix, or a version of this game that would work, but no such luck.

Here's the thing though, it's specifically an issue with the AGP version of the GeForce 2. It works flawlessly with the PCI version. It has nothing to do with drivers because it's a DOS game and the issue occurs both in from a Windows and MS-DOS mode.

I'm actually using a GeForce 2 MX PCI, so having the same issues 🤣! But yeah, I had the same issue running it from Windows 98 SE and in real dos mode.

BoozerDawg wrote on 2022-03-22, 01:04:

I'm actually using a GeForce 2 MX PCI, so having the same issues 🤣! But yeah, I had the same issue running it from Windows 98 SE and in real dos mode.

It has been quite a few years, so my memory is fuzzy, I had it in my mind that it worked fine with my Gainward Geforce 2 PCI cards, but I'm probably wrong about that then.

Moved to Marvin -> Video.

Totempole wrote on 2022-03-22, 02:18:

BoozerDawg wrote on 2022-03-22, 01:04:

I'm actually using a GeForce 2 MX PCI, so having the same issues 🤣! But yeah, I had the same issue running it from Windows 98 SE and in real dos mode.

It has been quite a few years, so my memory is fuzzy, I had it in my mind that it worked fine with my Gainward Geforce 2 PCI cards, but I'm probably wrong about that then.

Would be interesting if your GF2 MX PCI did in fact work correctly with TR1 😋

I would try to replace dos4gw with a different dos extender and see if theres an improvement.

Hi
I put together such a computer AMD Duron 750 MHz - Geforce 2 MX 200 64Mb - SL-75DRV5-C - 768 MB - WIN XP SP3
Tomb Raider 1 works fine for me with Advanced Tomb Raider Installer 1.06 + VDM Sound. (1024x768 30FPS)
The Geforce 2 MX 200 is stable when using this game with dgVoodoo..