Strange visual issue in Trilby's Notes

[LPSP]

So I've been working my way through Yahtzee's old games on something of a nostalgia bend lately. Reached Trilby's Notes a few days and started it up. And then .... uh ....

Well, see for yourselves.

     

   
It's a very strange visual effect - the screenshots presented here are not the complete image that I see on screen. Instead, it's like these weird max-saturation colour patterns have been overlayed on top of the regular visuals, so I'll see a usual screenshot such as the opening cinematics but with lots of colourful circles covering parts of it up.

My best shot-in-the-dark guess would be that there's some sort of lighting or overlay effect (hence the radial patterns and prescence along edges) that's gone wrong, which would also explain why my screenshots just look black except for the errors. But ofc that's just a guess.

I've run the AGS winsetup.exe and tried every combination of options present, with no effect thus far. It's only effecting Trilby's Notes and no other AGS games that I've played / am playing recently.

Is this a known (or even remotely common) error in AGS games, or old ones at least? All input appreciated.

[Snarky]

My first guess is that it's a 256-color (aka 8-bit) gameâ€"you can check that in winsetupâ€"and that your graphics card doesn't support that graphics mode. If so, it might be possible to fix that with drivers or registry hacks, but it tends to be pretty hard to resolve. Possibly running it within some kind of emulator or VM might be easier.

[Crimson Wizard]

Try running with the latest engine first, it may work better on contemporary systems and also supports running 8-bit games with Direct3D and OpenGL with certain limitations.
To do so - download AGS, take acwin.exe from its installation and copy it into game's folder. To run new setup call "acwin.exe --setup" from command line. Run acwin.exe to launch the game.