Weird black screen problems.

[Rahama]

I've I just got a hold of fallout 1 and 2 for the first time today and I'm having technical problems when the gameplay starts. I have no problems getting through any of the starting videos or charactor creation screens. However once all the videos are over and I take a few steps foward I end up with a very strange error.

The enitre screen seems to go black except for whatever areas I move my mouse over turn normal for a few seconds and then go black agian. I can bring up menus and such but the rest of the screen stays black.

I am on windows xp with direct x9.0 on a radion 7200 video card with 128 megs of video.

Any ideas how to fix this?

 

[ommony]

I was having the same damn problem last night (first time playing on WinXP) and I think I've fixed it by running in compatibility mode for Win95 and checking the "turn of advanced text services" box.

EDIT: Ok, I lied. It's still doing the same thing for me as well. Although it does it LESS OFTEN. I've found I can tolerate it because you can use F1 to clear the screen pretty quickly...although that doesn't work if it happens when you're bartering or something. Anybody else have any clues?

I'm still having an odd problem where in certain menus (not in-game, but while creating character or loading a game) the mouse will suddenly sort of control itself. Looks like maybe it's doing what I'm trying to do but in super slow-motion. How boring! Least it only seems to happen out of the game.

 

[ommony]

Well, I found a solution to all my problems! Hooray! I just installed the DOS version instead of the Windows version of the game. Now everything works great. The only potential problem here is if your fancy new sound card doesn't have good legacy support, in which case you'll need to go download VDMSound (freeware) and then you'll be set.