Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 Problems

I bought a copy of R6Vegas2 on opening day, and have experienced a wealth of odd problems. Hopefully this post will serve to help someone else, as Ubisoft’s support is less than stellar, and would recommend a gambit of obvious things, such as virus scans, driver updates, stopping other applications, and starting the game from whichever of Start Menu, DVD autoplay, or R6Vegas2_Game.exe directly that you didn’t try already.

Game loads without text or menus

The Invisible Menu Text problem. The first time I loaded the game after installing update 1.01, it went through the start sequence similar to most Ubisoft games - The circles logo with sound, a warning that “Game experience may change during online play”, and ended up in a full screen 3D image of a large room. This is where the main menu of the game is supposed to reside, but the text is missing. The menu is still present, and produces the expected audio feedback when mousing over, or navigating with the keyboard’s arrow keys. The game defaults to requiring a relatively high video quality, which doesn’t render the menu correctly on some video cards. In my case, that was an ATI x1600, which passes the supported hardware check. Problem happened with DirectX 9.0c and 10.

Solution: Max out the quality options in your video card settings. That is, in Windows Display Settings, I turned on 2x Anti-aliasing, and 16x Anisotropic Filtering. This made the game run like shit, but the menu works well enough to reduce the quality settings in the game itself. After that, the game is playable.

Cannot locate the DVD-ROM

The Copy Protection Problem. When trying to start the game, it may seek the dvd drive for some 20 seconds, then return with the error message “Cannot locate the DVD-ROM - Please insert the correct DVD-ROM, select OK and restart application.”

Obviously, the DVD is inserted into the drive.

There is a patched version of R2Vegas2_Game.exe floating around which bypasses the SecureRom check, but this also breaks online play. This is sub-optimal.

Reports have been seen that this is related to the DVD drive not handling SecureRom properly, or the game not supporting SATA dvdrom drives, and requiring IDE compatibility mode. The drive in my iMac is a Matshita DVD-R UJ-85J, not easily replaceable.

The game is known to interact badly with the excellent utility Daemon Tools version 3.x. Exiting or disabling D-Tools from startup is insufficient, it must be uninstalled completely, or masked. There exists a tool known as YASU which hides Daemon Tools 4.0.6 devices from SafeDisc & SecuROM. I have not tested this.

There is an official no-cd binary from Ubisoft at http://help.support.ubi.com/R6Vegas2_Fix.zip that permits online play, for v1.02. This binary has since been removed from Ubisoft’s webserver, after it was revealed that the patch is a no-cd crack produced by the group RELOADED, and redistributed verbatim by Ubisoft’s tech support team to work around DRM issues.

The file was removed from the site over a week ago now and the matter is being thoroughly investigated by senior tech support managers here at Ubisoft.

Needless to say we do not support or condone copy protection circumvention methods like this and this particular incident is in direct conflict with Ubisoft’s policies. -Ubisoft UK Community Manager

The fixed binary for v1.02 doesn’t work fully with v1.03 (game loads, but multiplayer discovery is broken). It is recommended to get Reloaded’s patch for 1.03 from gameburnworld or this mirror.

For reference, MD5 hashes of the binaries:

• MD5 (R6Vegas2_Fix.zip/R6Vegas2_Game.exe) = 0c20729963ff96ebd202832cb895fec4
• MD5 (Reloaded-v1.02/R6Vegas2_Game.exe) = 0c20729963ff96ebd202832cb895fec4
• MD5 (Official-v1.03/R6Vegas2_Game.exe) = 54f0a3f591c5bff84638f8676c60072e
• MD5 (Reloaded-v1.03/R6Vegas2_Game.exe) = 835a6aa804f4f26cfa21adea54d0313a