This is very annoying. When I play the games every now and then the game will flicker to a black screen for a split-second.

Weird. What OS and what screen card do you have? I use win 7 64 bits, and have a 460 card. I never had that problem while playing.

Win7 64-Bit.

The problem happens with both my Intel and Nvidia GPUs (I have an m11x).

Have the same problem using an ATI Card and Windows 7 64-bit.

Edit: nm - different AoW version. Whoopsie!

Try setting the affinity of the game .exe that is running in task manager to one main processor. I would also turn off any unecessary programs while playing. Try turning everything off under your startup list in MSconfig, and then backtrack from there...

When I first loaded it up SM I noticed an intermittent graphical blip also, like the OP. I did as Bluerussian suggests and set the afinity to run the program on one CPU. Seems to have done the trick. So it may be a multicore issue.

I have this problem as well but my rig is much different.

Here's my specs:
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ 2.4ghz
Geforce 7600GS 512mb
2gb ram
WIndows XP SP3

Oh and small hijack:
Age of Wonders 1 doesn't start at all, it just sits in the task manager doing nothing.

I'm no tech but the flickering sounds to me like a monitor refresh rate problem. Try fiddling with the refresh rate. Probably unrelated but I get the problem that the program I start just sit in the task manager and I can't get to it on my Vista 64 bit system sometimes. Usually I don't bother solving the real problem and go for the quick solution of opening another program that fills the screen like for example maximised Firefox and then start the troublesome program.
Found that by accident and have no idéa why it works. Worth a shot anyway.

I actually fixed both of these issues by disabling Direct Sound, shortly after posting that... lol.
Didn't notice there was a set up program inside the AoW1 & 2 folders.

Thanks though.

I went ahead and turned off Direct Sound, and I still get the black screen flckering.

Any way to fix this guys? I'd love to play these games without the stupid screen flickering.

same problem here with shadow magic.

anyone found a solution other than playing windowed?

actually on a 6870 with catalyst 11.5 and win 7 64 bit, turning on direct 3d solvedi the flickering problem.

no other issues so far.

I would like to place my issue in as well. Flickering black screen in fullscreen for AoW 1 an AoW 2 (AoWSM is fine though), none in windowed mode. I'd really love to play this game in fullscreen though.

Other than that, I haven't played this game before and would like to try to get into it. :)

At least it really doesn't seem to come up often. It can be ignored easily.