Odd screen problem while playing AGS made games

hexfield · Tue 22/08/2006 03:35:25

Hi, I'm new to AGS. Hopefully this is the right forum for this quesiton, I realize my problem is with playing the games and not creating them (I haven't gotten that far just yet), but it seems to apply to anything made with AGS so I thought it was worth a shot.

When I load up any AGS game at any resolution, it will first appear to work fine. But when I move my mouse around, the screen flickers black with every movement. Eventually, it will just stay black and I will lose graphics (happens especially often on menu screens). When I play in windowed mode, my desktop icons flicker along with the windowed game.

This is a new problem as I've played many AGS games before, but it only happens with AGS games. I uninstalled and reinstalled my graphics driver (ATI All in Wonder 9600) and made sure I had the latest DirectX.

I searched the forums and couldn't find this problem, sorry if I missed it. Any help is welcome.

--Ryan

R4L · Tue 22/08/2006 04:55:08

Do you meet the system requirements (even tho they're not really "high" standards) to play these games?

hexfield · Tue 22/08/2006 04:58:09

Yeah I should. I'm running XP. AMD Athlon 3500 chip. A gig of RAM. Plenty o' hard disk space.

Gilbert · Tue 22/08/2006 09:26:59

Hmmm looks like a driver (your card or directx) problem to me, try upgrading/reinstalling your video card drivers/directx and see if it helps.

hexfield · Tue 22/08/2006 15:28:12

I've got the latest DirectX and I've run the self-diagnostic. Everything checks out. I've also reinstalled my graphics driver and have the latest version there as well. I will reinstall directx and report back.

--Ryan

hexfield · Tue 22/08/2006 15:39:34

No that didn't help unfortunately. I can't imagine what the problem is. However, I just realized that this started after I installed the demo for Al Emmo, the new Himalaya Studios game that was built on the AGS engine but isn't suffering from this problem. Any thoughts on this? I'm going to uninstall the demo and see if that helps anything.

hexfield · Tue 22/08/2006 15:44:42

Nope, uninstalling it didn't help. But I still wonder why the problem didn't appear in this game. Any ideas?

hexfield · Tue 22/08/2006 15:49:13

Ok sorry to keep replying, but here's a new twist. I downloaded a newer game, Winter Rose. With this game, I see no problems in full screen mode. But when I play windowed mode, the icons on my desktop still flicker when I move the mouse. Let me know if this makes any sense to anyone.

SSH · Tue 22/08/2006 16:34:43

You can edit your old posts rather than make multiple posts one after the other...

I think this is the old AMD X2 problem that I used to have... I think you need to install this: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/Setup.exe

Also, I think games made before AGS 2.71RC3 used an older version of Allegro which didn't like new Nvidia graphics cards. You can use the latest engine to run older games, see the AGS 2.72 thread for details.

hexfield · Wed 23/08/2006 01:43:13

Sorry for the multiple replies, I don't know why I didn't just modify. That exe you linked didn't help unfortunately. I don't believe I have a dual core processor.

The runtime zip you linked in the other forum seems to help for Winter Rose but I think Rob Blanc is too old for it as I get the message that the game needs to be at least engine 2.5. But I downloaded a few newer games and they seem to work fine, using the new engine when necessary. This is a good fix for now. Thanks for your time.

--Ryan