Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Spooge Error? Dawn Of War does work on a MacBook Pro



I recently ran into problems with Dawn of War on my MacBook Pro when Patch 140 was applied. The next time I launched Dawn of War after Patch 140 was applied, I was greeted with the following odd error:



"Spooge driver not found. Verify that DirectX is properly installed."

Chances are - you are fine, and there is no driver problem. If you Google the Net you'll see lots of people offering advice to run diagnostics, load drivers from unofficial locations, reload DirectX..... Don't do any of that...it's unnecessary. And it may also really mess up your system if you install a video driver that didn't come with Boot Camp.

Instead, continue applying Dawn of War patches manually until you reach the latest official patch release (v1.51). Now since Dawn of War is no longer working, you'll have to download them manually from here:

Dawn of War Patches

Once you've reached the highest patch level available (currently v1.51), then follow the instructions at this link. It's a small text file that tells Dawn of War to ignore the Spooge error.

Spooge error with VISTA and 8800 GTX

This blogger's patch was for Vista and an 8800 GTX card. But it also works for the 8600M board that's built into the MacBook Pro.

Now Dawn of War should run without problems. I hope this saves other people a lot of headaches. Dawn of War is an EXCELLENT game and it runs super-smooth at high resolutions on a MacBook Pro. Don't let that Spooge Error wreck your day!

3 comments:

fellmonster said...

Hey, I have a macbook and im trying this running vm fusion (not bootcamp) and I can't get the computer to get the patches to work? I am starting with v1.01. Any clue?

BTW i've been looking for a solution to this spooge error and your answer is the most appealing one on the web, but the computer won't run 1.51, 1.2 or 1.01 patches. What do you think?

Anonymous said...

That was the solution I was searching for! Thank you.

I modified it a bit, because I am kind of lazy and like DoW downloading the updates itself, so I just fixed the DirectX config file to get the game running and then connecte to an online game for the download.

A more brutal solution to getting past the "spooge driver" issue is to simply remove the detailed handling of different devices alltogether.

I wrote a summary on several solutions to this problem (using VMWare as well as Bootcamp) on the following page, maybe you're interested in linking it in the article: http://www.tobias-prinz.de/index.php/Dawn_of_War

Francis Wong said...

Matt - Check out Tierlieb's solution in the comments. I haven't had a chance to try out his Boot Camp solution variant, but I noticed that his link contains comments regarding a VMWare solution (suggestion: enable hardware acceleration in the VMWare configuration.) Thanks Tierlieb!