Black box covers portion of screen

[danpascooch]

I'm at my wits end with trying to get this game to work, and am hoping you good folks can help me out.

The basic problem I'm having is that a portion of the screen in Fallout 1 appears black. I don't think this is fully just a graphical error because the black area is non-interactable. The cursor changes when it is over the black portion (it changes to the same cursor that is used when in the menu before loading your save), and clicking on any area within it does not cause my character to walk to it.

This is what it looks like in windowed mode:

http://imgur.com/ac3wX

In fullscreen mode it is the same size, but the black area occupies the top left corner.

If I set the resolution to 640x480 this black portion occupies the entire game-view, leaving only the bottom portion of the screen containing the menu intact.

I have both the high-resolution patch and the 1.2 patch, this error occurs whether I run 8, 16, or 32 bit colors, whether it's windowed or fullscreen, and regardless of whether I enable 2x scaling.

Thanks for your time.

EDIT: My mistake, the black portion actually IS interactable, and I can click inside it to have my character walk to a location. The cursor definitely changes when over it though, could it somehow be a graphical remnant of a menu? It seems to be about the same size as the equipment or character menus are when open.

Also, when I open the character or equipment menu it displays correctly on top of the black area, so it's not as though it's a completely dead area of the screen, menus will display over it.

Also, this happens on all graphical modes of the high res patch

 

[mobucks]

Are you running the game on a laptop?

 

[danpascooch]

Yes I am, is there something inherent about laptops that can cause this? That would greatly surprise me.

I have a desktop, but it's a fresh Windows install and doesn't have the older Directx dll's to run this, I'm installing them now and will report back after I try to run it on the desktop.

EDIT: Same problem with Desktop PC, so it has to be an issue with the install, the directory of which I moved to the desktop using a flash drive.

 

[PlanHex]

Try doing a fresh manual install without the resolution patch and see if you still get the black screen at the standard resolution with the save game you currently use.
It's probably just the patch's fault, in which case you should ask the guy who made the resolution patch instead or just play without it.

 

[danpascooch]

The box is gone with a fresh patch-less install but the game still isn't playable in that state, I'm going to try a new manual install with just 1.1 and the resolution patch and see what happens now that I have those older directx dlls

EDIT: Fresh install with just 1.1 and the patch worked, guess I just needed to try it again fresh, the install I was using had just been modified in too many ways while I was trying to get it to work I guess, who knows what I did to cause that stupid box.

Thanks guys, I appreciate the help.