did you try anything in the faq?
fallout 1 faq?

No but I did read the FAQ before posting this. There just isn't really another problem in there that is like mine.

many fixes in the FAQ are sort of.. wide spread, try the fan made patch, also try checking your video card settings. From what I understand from steam forums, errors like that are usually video card related, but I could be wrong.

Just to make sure we are working with clen GOG install, reinstall your GOG copy of Fallout from scratch and see if that helps. I don't know if oyu have any fan-made patches.
Also, system specs would be helpful.

Tried uninstalling and re-installing it from scratch. Didn't help. One of the fixes I was going to try is to change that fallout.cfg file or whatever, but I don't seem to see it anywhere. It's like it never downloads and installs properly.
My graphics card is a NVIDIA RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro. Not that I have any idea what that means, i'm completely computer illiterate. I have more than enough memory obviously, so I am stumped here.

Rule #1 of programming: "Thou shalt not dereference a null pointer".
So what you're getting is basically the most generic and uninformative error message possible. Only managed to find a few such posts related to various user-made mods on NMA, but if you're not using any, I've no further ideas.

Yeah, I don't have any mods downloaded at all. Just the game. Daaaaaammit I wanna play this!

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAW! it decided to work for some reason. Yay! Thanks for your help, or trying to help anyway, guys.

I had the same problem. Just delete the ddraw.dll file and it should work fine

This worked perfectlly for me, thanks!
It gave me this error trying to run it with Parallels on a MacBook.

Awesome, this worked for me too!!

wheres the ddraw file?

Didn't work for me, though my error has the letter f in place of the numbers for the error message (though no one on the internet has seemed to have any problem like mine with the f's instead of numbers)