Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands Crashes, Freezes, Auto-Save Glitch, Resolution error, launch problems, stuttering, and more, fix and fixes

Prince Of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is the next chapter in the Sands of Time saga. Visiting his brother's kingdom following his adventure in Azad, the Prince finds the royal palace under siege from a mighty army bent on its destruction. When the decision is made to use the ancient power of the Sand in a desperate gamble to save the kingdom from total annihilation, the Prince embarks on an epic adventure in which he learns to bear the mantle of true leadership, and discover that great power often comes with a great cost. The Forgotten Sands is a swashbuckling adventure, a true Prince of Persia game dedicated to allowing the player to jump and twirl the Prince through a vertiginous jungle gym of traps and challenges. Unfortunately, manipulating time can’t undo the numerous glitches, errors, and crashes, some players have encountered.Incase you couldn find what you were after,feel free to comment and ill get back to you.
Note:  Make sure that Nvidia or Ati drivers are upto date.
System Requirements:

Minimum:

CPU: 1.6 GHz dual-core Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
RAM: 1 GB Windows XP / 2 GB Windows Vista, Windows 7
Graphics: 256 MB DirectX 9.0c-compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (NVIDIA GeForce 6800 / ATI RADEON X1600) (see supported list*)
HDD: 8 GB

Recommended:

CPU: 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or higher
RAM: 2 GB / 4 GB
Graphics: 512 MB DirectX 9.0c-compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT / ATI RADEON HD 2600 PRO) (see supported list*)

Recommended control device: Windows-compliant keyboard, mouse, optional controller (Xbox 360 Controller for Windows recommended)
Note: *Supported Video Cards at Time of Release: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 100 / 200 / GTX series ATI RADEON X1600 / HD 2000 / HD 3000 / HD 4000 / HD 5000 series Laptop versions of these cards may work but are NOT supported. These chipsets are the only ones that will run this game.

Problem #1: Encounters black screen or can’t change the resolution of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC:

Solution : (By Boxed0 from the Steam forums)

Open regedit, search for “AlternateVerticalSyncThreshold”. Unless you have multiple Ubi games installed, it should immediately give you PoP’s registry key. It should look something like Software->Ubisoft->Prince of Persia - The Forgotten Sands->1.000000000->Engine

Right-click the folder called 1.000000000 and rename it to 1.0.

Problem solved. Yeah, it’s hilarious, I know. Way to go, Ubisoft.

Problem #2: Encounter Auto-Save glitch / error when playing Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands on the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360:

Solution: (By FredEx919 from the Ubisoft forums)

One thing I can suggest at this point would be to run the game from your backup Auto Save file. I included the steps for this below.

Xbox 360
1. From the dash board go to “My Xbox”
2. Scroll to System Settings (Far Right)
3. Choose “memory”
4. Open your storage device
5. Choose Games
6. Select “Prince of Prince:TFS”

PS3
1. From the XMB scroll to the games menu
2. Open the save data utility folder
3. Locate prince of Persia: TFS

You most likely have an “Auto Save” file and a “Backup Autosave” file. You can try deleting the “Auto Save” and then starting the game and choosing “Continue” allowing it to load from the backup autosave file. This will hopefully take you to an earlier point in the game that you can continue from.

Problem #3: Can’t play Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC properly with a Xbox 360 controller:

Solution: (By tautologico from the Steam forums)

Ok, as a follow up, I managed to solve the problem. What I have read around is that the official Microsoft drivers for the xbox360 controller doesn’t let you control settings like the sensitivity of the analog sticks, and this can cause problems with older games (newer games that use the xinput API doesn’t seem to have trouble with this, I’ve played Batman Arkham Asylum and even enabled the gamepad in L4D just to test it).

There’s an open source driver for the original XBox controller and the xbox360 controller for windows with which you can control settings and better fine tune the controller for some games, it’s called XBCD. I’ve downloaded and installed it and used some settings I’ve found around and it’s working wonderfully. The driver is a bit of a hassle to install and use in Vista SP1 or Windows 7, though.

More details (and the link to download the newest version of the XBCD drivers) here:
http://redcl0ud.1.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=2155

Problem #4: Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC can’t start / launch:

Solution: (By eXist73 from the Steam forums)

My Solution:
It seems like something was messed up in my Registry.

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Ubisoft
There was a “Launcher” and a “Ubisoft Game Launcher”

The Launcher folder had some default registry keys.
I copied those into the Ubisoft Game Launcher folder and everything worked fine.

Problem #5:How to run Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC with Vsync on:
Solution: (By RunsWithFire from the Steam forums)

I’ve discovered that if you enable Triple Buffering under your graphics card control panel, it makes the slow movement sporadic, and slightly more bearable.

Problem #6: Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC stutters / runs slow / low framerate or performance:

Solution:For multi-core processors, alt+tab Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and change processor affinity to one or zero

Problem #7: How to enable fog without lowering the framerate / performance of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC:
Solution: (By SKA-T from the Steam forums)

For Sands of Time I changed the hardware.ini file to enable fog, without it overpowering the screen. The 2 settings I changed were:

ForceVSFog=1
InvertFogRange=0

Initially my file had ForceVSFog=0 and InvertFogRange=1
I took screenshots to be sure, because the fog effect is fairly subtle, but it worked for me.

I’m running Win7 x64 with an EVGA GTX260.

Hope this helps someone else.

Update: If you follow the same procedure for the hardware.ini file in the Warrior Within directory it fixes the fog for that game as well.

Problem #8: Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands PC crashes / Freezes while playing:

Solution: First of all, try toning the game a bit lower: it won’t look that good, but at least you’ll be able to play it.Alternately, for those with multi core processors, change processor affinity to one or zero – this should do the trick for you!

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