......No nothing has been said about it by GOG, and the only thing I can think of doing is getting more people to contact GOG support, then MAYBE something would get done....I mean it CAN'T be impossible to get this game to run its a QuickTime bug for fricks sake...in fact I KNOW the game can run, since I hunted down an original boxed copy and got it to work with the ancient QT installed other than some audio static during FMV there were no major issues.....but there are not all that many boxed copies of Septerra Core from 1998 lying around anymore, trust me........so we really need to grab GOGs' attention on this somehow.

Is it a quicktime problem? Mine plays the movies but then when I get to the main title screen it gets all distorted. If I hit space bar a fatal error panic code comes up and the game exits out.

Yes its QT i tried it with the old version of QuickTime that the CD version had in 1998 (version 4) and the crash didn't happen.....THEN, I installed the current version and the fatal error happens just like in the GOG version, so yes it IS a problem with the current QT and Win8

Just a quick note - check the "unofficial patch" thread. I installed Quicktime Alternative, then installed the patch. It transcoded the video files to AVI (a little lower quality, but working). After finishing, the readme suggests adding CPUIdle to the septerra.ini file. I set that as well and the game was playable in Win8 x64.

Essentially I've tried the whole matrix of all below possible values in every combination with each other:
- With and without UO patch
- With gog supplied QT, latest Apple supplied QT, and QT Alternative
- Tried with copying those QT files to the Septerra directory
- Tried with each version of the file in the Septerra directory before or after installing UO patch
- Every OS version for compatibility settings
- 16-bit color compatibility settings
- 640x480 compatibility settings
- With and without running as admin
- With UO patch, CPUIdle scores of 0-5 and nonexistent
- With UO patch, ScaleMode scores of 0-2 and nonexistent
- Windowed mode
- Lowering priority to normal or lower
- Setting CPU affinity to only one core

... nothing seems to get rid of the stutter while keeping the videos enabled. I can get either the videos working but the game too stuttery to play, or the game working smoothly with no videos.

Ugh.

I just installed the game today on a Windows 8 x64 laptop and had the same issue (double purple main menu, no visible cursor, quite impossible to work with). I didn't have any Quicktime installed either.

I just installed the latest version of Quicktime, installed unofficial patch and set compatibility to Windows 7. Movies work fine, though the game did crash after playing the first one (not the intro ones, but the first one in a New Game) with compatibility off. At the moment, I have no issues whatsoever.

Well, this sucks. I was never able to get this to work, so I just gave up an picked up VMWARE workstation 9. I installed XP on a VM, and can play this game fine. There is just one strange bug which is when you finish a battle and pickup items, sometimes it hangs for 30sec. If you wait, it is fine. Other than that everything runs at normal speed (i7-2600K).

I feel your pain man but the good news is that I solved that EXACT same issue. I downloaded\installed QT 7 then I downloaded\installed patch 1.04 from softpedia. I did not see the ads or intro in the beginning but it loaded the doskias & aspertine conversation and the game ran fine for 20 minutes until I quit. I hope this helps, also props to SWhisssper for reminding me of the patch.

I gave up, trying to playing this on Win8, the good news, is that it runs fine under Wine for Linux.

I've given up too. May have to run another OS in a VM.

For anyone else with this issue, I got it to work without graphical glitches by updating to the latest quicktime, and then removing the files quicktime and quicktime preferences from the septerra install folder.

Do the movies still play?

Well this is embarrassing, but I didn't even realize there were in game videos. Got it working properly on my windows 7 machine though. So to answer your question, removing the quicktime files from the folder fixes the screen issues but does not allow the movies to load.

On a side note, running septerra in windows xp sp2 compatibility mode even with the quicktime files removed will restore the videos AND the screen issues. Having the latest quicktime or quicktime alternate installed and playing around with video acceleration makes no diiference :(

One would think, simply replacing the Qt format should not be such a big hurdle, but then that's what happens when you lose the source code.

make a text file within the septerra core folder.
add the lines

taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
septerra.EXE
Start explorer.exe

then save it as septerra.bat if it is still a text file change the hide extension for know type under folder options and erase .txt and delete quicktime.qts then double click on septerra.bat to get the game to run and the graphic problem should be fixed :)