I started off without any problems in AC. I'd already checked a bunch of the crash threads here whilst downloading, and tried the "DirectDraw=0" trick to get it to fit my widescreen resolution, but it crashed upon scrolling across the landscape.
Rather than mess around anymore, I just decided to play in standard res and was having a great game. Around two hours in, it suddenly froze up, all the colours went glitchy and I had to kill it with task manager.
After exiting, it had somehow set my desktop res to 1024, so I reset that, relaunched the game undeterred and now its stuck in widescreen - but simply stretched to fit the screen.

Ive checked the ini file, but can't see anything wrong, and now I'm a bit stumped.

Any ideas?

I'll maybe try reinstalling later, but I figured I'd ask as I'm on Windows 7 64bit and I know how it sometimes has problems with stuff like this.

Before you tried the ini, was the game centered on your screen with two vertical black bars at the edge of your monitor? Like this http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/269/84092895.jpg/sr=1

If so, the widescreen stretching will be handled by your system not Alpha Centauri. Do you have an Nvidia or ATI graphics card? If you do, you can download their latest drivers which should install their appropriate control panel, from there you can set whether you want the monitor to stretch or center the 4:3 image of games like Alpha Centauri.

Yes, that's how it was before the fix - and whislt I've an intel card, I've checked the options, changed them and nothing different. Even clean reinstalled the game but still no change. I've literally just found another thread suggesting I change my desktop resolution and use the direct draw fix, so I'll try that and see.

Thanks for the reply!

Yes - did all the usual fixes, tweaks and gremlin hunts. I remember this happening years ago with a different computer and game and there was no fix to my memory - just one of those odd things that happen.

It's not unplayable like this - just odd looking like its zoomed to 1024 width rather than stretched.

Clean install just the other day, update applied today - no mods / community extras at all.
Still get the weird crash - usually after about twenty turns or so.

Okay, thanks - I'll retry the direct draw fix with a different desktop res first and try grab some screens too in case that helps either me, or support sort something out.

Thanks for the replies guys! - Much appreciated!

Just out of curiosity, is the screen stretching happening with any other old GoG games? If not you can probably narrow it down to Alpha Centauri, but if it's happening with other games there might be an option somewhere to stop the screen stretching.

My monitor can switch between aspect ratios from its remote control\monitor buttons, maybe you have the same? Still the crash is weird though.

GAAAAAARGH!

WHY DIDNT I THINK TO CHECK THAT BEFORE?!

I checked my graphics card settings etc. but NOT another similar aspect ratio'd GOG GAAAAAAGH!
They're all the same.

Evidently my impending birthday is abundant with senility!

Right... So now I know there's a setti somewhere on my system to fix it. Just need to figure out what and where!

Thanks!

PS: Sorry I wasted your time with this folks - but I do appreciate the help! Still doesn't look likely to solve the trippy colours crash, but I could be wrong..
...again! Heheh!.

Yeah hopefully you can dig up the setting somewhere, as for the color crash: with Vista I found that Windows Aero interferes with some old games, setting your Windows theme to 'classic' might prevent the color thing, bit of a long shot but you never know.

If it's coming up after 20 turns or so, maybe it is because the game is trying to play one of the FMVs (videos) and for some reason W7 doesn't like it? Didn't think the game played videos after just 20 turns though.

You could try just installing SMAC (Alpha Centauri) without its expansion and see if the crash still happens. There was some confusion surrounding what the Gog expansion patch does, maybe it introduced some problem? Still just guessing though.

Hmmm... so this IS weird - my other games didnt do this before installing Alpha Centauri and experiencing the first weird crash, but now both Eador: Genesis and Divine Divinity share the stretch fit problem.

So, whilst searching through my system for the setting to try and sort it out, I realised that for some reason in the graphics panel, I couldn't uncheck "maintain display scaling" - which as it turns out is a current design flaw.
However, I then remembered about the hotkeys and sure enough, theres a hot key to fix that.

So, I ran AC, hit the hotkey and it returned to its original boxed 1024 type resolution - but on exit (like after the first crash) it had changed my desktop resolution to 660x480 AND disabled Aero - which isn't even an option under my graphics options.

I'm beginning to wonder if their isnt some odd compatability issue with the card itself - though quite how the other games have been affected the same way since the problem started with AC I don't know. Either that or during the crash windows has decided on this as some sort of fix - I'm at an utter loss.

Edit: seems the additional options have now appeared for the graphics card by going into its properties under the device manager (centre screen, maintain aspect ratio etc - they weren't there before) but not in the graphics panel itself. I've set it to "maintain aspect ratio" and I'll report back with anything else as someone else may find it useful.

Edit2: Just tried the DirectDraw fix, and suddenly it's running in widescreen, without the scrolling crash some people have had. I'm gonna try a game and see if I hit the specific "weird" crash I've had or not.