As the title states, whenever i play this game there seems to be some sort of weird flickering going on. Not too sure if anyone else has the same problem, or if there is some sort of a solution to it. I tried doing a massive search, couldn't find a thing. I've tried tampering with the on launch details, such as the resolution, 256k colours, compatibility, etc. Nothing seems to be working.

Any sort of help would be much appreciated.

This game runs fine on my desktop, but I was getting serious flickers on my laptop. I tried several compatibility mode settings with varying degrees of success. Some of the other threads in this forum were helpful, but the game was still a bit quirky. Then I stumbled across some old DirectDraw registry settings, and found that one seems to get Sanitarium running perfectly on my laptop:

Under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DirectDraw, I created a DWORD value named EmulationOnly and set it to 1.

On a 32-bit machine, the key would be HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectDraw.

This allows me to run the game perfectly from the shortcut created by the GOG installer, without touching any other registry/compatibility settings. I know I was banging my head against the wall a bit with this flickering issue, so I hope this helps someone else.

What does it emulate for? I have to try this, I want to see if I can combine this solution for no crashes and no performance issues.

Well, of course! Thank you!!!

The flag "-e" is what this is. It's what I've been playing with the sntrm.exe because I can't add it at the end of the GOGlauncher. Now I can play with the emulation and using GOGlauncher, likely with no crashes and no performance issues.

Great find Aransus!

Aha! I saw your post about running with the "-e" switch, and that's what I was doing too until I stumbled across this registry setting. I never considered that "-e" meant "emulation". Thanks for your helpful posts Nirth :).