Black screen on Win7?

[Radiant]

I've received a report that One Room One Cheese (a v2.7 game for the last OROW contest) doesn't work under Windows 7 64-bit: to be precise, it runs but doesn't update the screen. This happens in both windowed and fullscreen mode.

...does this sound familiar to anyone? What can be done about it?

[DoorKnobHandle]

I would ask the player to draw using both driver modes first, see if that makes a difference.

EDIT: I'm an idiot, you said v.2.7

[arj0n]

It does runs properly on Windows 7 64-bit here both full-screen and windowed mode.

Some specs:
Processor Name: AMD Athlon II X4 640
Original Processor Frequency: 3000.0 MHz
Total Memory Size: 8 GBytes
Video Chipset: nVIDIA GeForce GT 430 (GF108-300)
Video Card: ASUS ENGT430
Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster BX2231
Resolution: 1920 x 1080

Maybe ask that reporter's PC specs?

[Scarab]

I've received a report that One Room One Cheese (a v2.7 game for the last OROW contest) doesn't work under Windows 7 64-bit: to be precise, it runs but doesn't update the screen. This happens in both windowed and fullscreen mode.

...does this sound familiar to anyone? What can be done about it?

This is not a Windows 7 specific problem. I'm on vista and it happens to me rather often. It seems to happen when I haven't shut down my laptop in a long time, and only put it to sleep, or if I'm running on battery only.

It's quite bothersome, because it often stops me from testing my own games. The two solutions that usually make it workable for me are rebooting (doesn't always work), and moving the window ever so slightly off the screen (just a one pixel overhang).

Interestingly, I've found that this problem doesn't affect areas under transparent GUIs, and only that area of the screen is refreshed while the rest remains static. Perhaps you could put a transparent GUI over the whole screen? That's worked for me before.

[hedgefield]

This was a big issue when Gemini Rue came out also, and it seems to plague a number of games created with an AGS version prior to 3+, possibly because they run in DirectDraw5 instead of Direct3D 9. There was a thread about it on the Wadjet Eye forums, maybe that can help you. What worked for me was switching my desktop resolution to 16bit or, by a fluke of science, dragging the game window down until it overlapped with the Aero taskbar.

[edit] The game works fine for me on this machine btw (win7 x64), although I suspect it will not on my own machine, which has two videocards with Optimus, a notorious source of woes. AGS games refuse to run on the high-powered Nvidia card, only on the built-in Intel, which causes a lot of these black/frozen screen problems.

[Layabout]

I have the same problem, it's a direct draw 5 conflict with newer gfx cards. Min is an ati card and won't run any game made with 2.72 or lower.

If you have win 7 pro or higher, you can use Windows Xp mode which is essentially a virtualized copy of Xp. Itll also work if you have a win Xp serial handy and use virtualbox.