Intel 82845 is indeed an old chipset that does not support DX9. Intel 945 is a normal chipset that works fine with DX9 programs such as A7 and A8.

Chipsets that don't support DX9 still work with A8, but you can not use all features. Simple rendering works, but shaders or shadows might not work. You can check the device properties and then disable those features in your game.

When a program gives no error message, but just crashes, the reason is not the chipset. There's something wrong on that PC, most likely a faulty DirectX configuration or driver.