I'm having quite a problem with Unreal Tournament GOTY. When starting the game, all I get is a black screen. I've tried so far (to no avail):
-Combatility modes (from Win95 to WinXP)
-Running it as an administrator
-Tried Direct3D, OpenGL and software
-Changing the colour depth of my desktop
I can run it in safemode, but as soon as I check or uncheck boxes before starting up the safemode, it fails again. When I'm in safemode, going to fullscreen locks the game up again (just the black screen).
Now what?
My system:
Windows Vista Basic
Mobo: Asus P5ND2-SE
CPU: Intel Dual Core e2180 (2Ghz)
RAM: 2GB
GFX: Nvidia Geforce 9600GT
Sound: Onboard

Yes! That worked! Thank you!

This does not help. I updated everything set the direct sound to false but I still get the black screen.

Try changing the renderer mode. In the ini file there should be a line like the following:

[Engine.Engine]
GameRenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

Change the GameRenderDevice value to any of the available renderers. I only have Unreal Gold installed right now as I finished with Unreal Tournament some years ago, but the ini files are very similar. Unreal Gold has the following renderers. You can get the renderer names from headings within the ini file.

SoftDrv.SoftwareRenderDevice
GlideDrv.GlideRenderDevice
D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice
D3D8Drv.D3D8RenderDevice
D3D9Drv.D3D9RenderDevice
OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

Hopefully one of them will work for you.

OpenGL solved it. Cool! Thanks!

It helped me with UT2004. Got a black screen for a sec and game was kicking me back to the desktop. Switching game render device in UT2004.ini [d:\GalaxyClient\Games\Unreal Tournament 2004\System] file to OpenGl helped. Thanks a lot.