Game doesn't load

[peekj]

First of all I'm new here, so bear with me.
I haven't played any HL or CS for a few years but I was with both of them from the beginning being involved in the original www.half-life.net (or was it halflife.net?) website and several major CS sites.

I have a problem. I just bought HL2 via Steam and installed it. Everything works beautifully until somewhere in Chapter 2, after I run through the train yard and down the stairs to the sewer entrace (I presume). It comes to a "loading..." screen, waits about 10 seconds, then dumps me back to the main screen...

I tried loading Chapter 3 by going to "New Game" but then HL2 crashes with a memory error.

Any ideas?

My system: AMD 64 3500+, 512MB DDR 400, Abit AV8 mobo, Geforce 6800 GT.

TIA

 

[peekj]

Ok, I jumped the gun. I checked out the Steam support site as is suggested here in the "Read first" thread.

This fixed it:

Add this to the end of your Half-Life 2 shortcut:

+mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1

 

[maniac618]

hmmm. I have the same system as you apart from 512mb more ram and didn't have a problem. Nice that you sorted it though!