So after having some problems with playing Sanitarium lately due to a messed-up color palette, as well as Darkstone which had messed up graphics/clipping issues, I got in contact with GOG support.

So apparently the latest drivers patch for ATI/AMD cards has "broken" all GOG games which have color palette issues, this is because in GOG's version of those games it kills explorer.exe automatically when you launch the game. It's an issue with how Vista/Window 7's Aero desktop conflicts with older Direct Draw games as far as I know. So this isn't an issue if you're using Windows 8 (hey I guess it's useful for something!).

Anyway I don't even know how many GOG games this affects, apart from Sanitarium the only GOG game I know which kills explorer before launching is Dark Reign 1, maybe some of you guys know some other GOG games which do this. Though the Darkstone issue isn't actually a color palette issue. So if you use an ATI video card and have had graphical problems with it recently, you should tell GOG support and post about here if you want.

TL;DR THIS IS HOW TO FIX IT
You need to downgrade to version 13.1 Catalyst drivers. Go here:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download
Put in your GPU info and go Display results, then go to "Previous Drivers and Software" up the top right of the page, then go to 13.1 and download it, then install (note you may need to uninstall your previous Catalyst version first then install the older drivers).

GOG support is certainly aware of the issue and it seems to be their priority after updating the installers to 2.0, but if you are really mad about this then you should go to AMD forums and write an angry post about how their new drivers are shit, or an email will do too.

Unfortunately AMD/ATI always breaks twice as many things as they fix with every update.
I'm still waiting for them to fix Mafia II, I've sent them a dozen reports that it doesn't work but they don't care about old games.

Yeah this doesn't surprise me at all. I'm using ATI at the moment because it was ahead of nVidia in the cost/performance ratio at the time I bought it. I think I've had more ATI's than nVidias but I will probably go with nVidia next time. And lets not talk about Linux drivers...

The Darkstone issue also occurs on Windows 8 and 8.1 since it is not related to DirectDraw palette handling.

Yes I got my ATI card on sale a few years ago but now I'm regretting it. Though maybe there's a hope being contacted by an official distributor like GOG might convince them to put something in a new patch to allow compatibility for some older games on GOG.

Random question: do the 13.11 beta drivers make any difference in this regard? If not, it can be safely assumed that Crosmando is right and that AMD just don't give a fuck about anything that's older than six months old.

If that's the case, my next card will also be a GeForce, although NVIDIA's drivers haven't been great with backwards compatibility in the past either.

From what I've heard, AMD have traditionally been the better one with backwards-compatibility.

What do you mean by "make any difference in this regard"? Sanitarium and Darkstone work fine in 13.1 (I tested them before making this thread).

He means "does 13.11 beta work where 13.9 (or whatever's the latest non-beta) doesn't?"

Yeah. The reason I bought an ATI card in the first place (then an HD 4870) was that I was sick of NVIDIA breaking compatibility with countless numbers of games. I was actually fairly happy with it until a couple of years ago when things started really going downhill with them.

Mind you, ATI's Linux drivers - as much of a clusterfuck they may be - are much better than they used to be.

I'm curious to know if things have improved in the back-comp camp for GeForce. I dare not ask on the GeForce forums because you'll have them all praising NVIDIA high and mighty and denying that they make any mistakes (the ATI forums are the same - sycophants insisting that errors are the user's or developer's fault, not ATI's).

Thanks for the heads-up, although I don't use Win 7 anymore (Fedora + Win 8.1)

Other than that, I see some people complaining about AMD here, but Nvidia's drivers really aren't better, especially the last few ones. And many people are reporting that they have been broken for 8 months now (!) for GTX 400/500 users, cards that are not very old. Just take a look at their forums : https://forums.geforce.com/default/board/33/geforce-drivers/ (sticky thread at the top). This issue seems widespread since I noticed people talking about it on other forums too.

I have systems with nVidia and AMD cards, in terms of compatibility with old games AMD (before this palette issue) was still far superior in my experience. I don't usually roll with the latest drivers from either company cause they both break shit consistently, only time I do is if I happen to buy a brand new game that performs poorly or doesn't work at all with the version i'm running.

EDIT:

Also, does the directdraw registry hack not fix this issue for the affected games with the new drivers? If my main rig wasn't running it's backup i'd test it myself right now, but in the past i've used it for Diablo / Hellfire and it works great.

See [url=http://www.lacl.fr/~matran/wiki/index.php?title=Gaming_Windows_Compatibility&redirect=no]http://www.lacl.fr/~matran/wiki/index.php?title=Gaming_Windows_Compatibility&redirect=no[/url]