From the time the game goes fullscreen at startup onwards, a flickering rectangle about an inch and a half appears in the center of the screen which then tracks the movement of the mouse pointer, however it does not stay where the mouse pointer is but rather it moves slightly further than the mouse pointer in the same direction, so eventually it is inches away from where the mouse pointer currently is. Whenever the game re-centers the mouse pointer it also re-centers this flickering rectangle. It seems like the mouse pointer sprite drawing code is flawed with an off-by-one error, but I suspect it is probably specific to the hardware or else every person playing the game would experience it and it'd probably have been fixed long ago.

I'm using an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro on Windows XP SP3 fully updated with ATI's latest drivers installed. There is no video corruption experienced in any other games on the system.

I've tried the game at a variety of resolutions and tried tweaking the cursor mode and other settings with no change. I've reduced the acceleration level in the ATI control panel as a troubleshooting aide and I can drop it as far as it will go and still have the game start up and there is no change.

I'm a former game developer and video driver hacker myself and this appears to either be an off by one error somewhere in the game's mouse cursor code that perhaps only occurs on particular hardware, or a video driver bug that only manifests in this game.

Curious if anyone else has experienced this problem, what hardware and drivers they are using, and what if any solutions or workarounds they may have found to get past this issue. It makes the game very difficult to play with a huge flickering rectangle on the screen that travels in the same direction as the mouse but faster than the actual pointer.

Have you tried changing the Cursor setting in the Video options?

Reading the Readme_BK.txt file in the installation folder, i see:

[i]3.3 Configuration issues

Mouse pointer moves slowly.
The movement of the mouse pointer depends on the frame rate and might be
too slow on low-end computers. To fix this problem from the "Main Menu"
go to the "Options" menu, select "Settings", switch to the "Video" tab by
clicking the "Video" button on the left and change the "Cursor" setting to
"System" value.[/i]

It is possible that your card has a problem of synchronization with the frame rate of the game and the in-game promt..

Besides, if you use AMD's Crossfire (or SLI?), it can corrupt the image (flickering text), and you need to associate an AMD profile for game.exe with Crossfire desabled. (go to Catalyst Control Center, gaming, 3D applications settings - then browse for the game.exe of teh game, and scroll down for desabling Crossfire before saving the profile)

Yes, no effect. GOG support suggested switching the game to windowed mode which did resolve the issue however. Since then I've discovered that my video memory is malfunctioning so I'm going to write this one off to faulty hardware for now. Other games started having noticeable problems also which worked fine before.

I assume the problem will go away when I build the new system I'm working on now. Hope so anyway. ;o)

Thanks for the reply. No crossfire or SLI here, just an ole Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB which is now defunct and removed sadly. Pretty sure it was the corrupt video memory which would affect hardware mouse cursors, although the problem also occurred when I disabled them. Still could occur with software rendered cursors if their images are in a bad area of video memory though.

Sadly, it's impossible to find remotely decent AGP video hardware to replace the dead card with nowadays without spending more money than it's worth so I'm putting the game on hold for now until I can build a new modern box, which I'm sure everyone would likely recommend as the best solution overall I suppose. ;o) This machine is rather ancient (2004 era) so it's time to move on. Hehe.

Thanks for your reply as well!

Incidentally, when I built a new PC this problem did go away with this game with my new CPU/GPU combination which is also AMD. I have a feeling that one might be able to work around the problem I was having above though by tweaking a custom game video setting configuration in the AMD control panel and fiddling with morphological filtering, and other settings as that's fixed some other game problems I had that were similar in nature.