So I installed this excellent game (Space Rangers 2) on my little netbook and found that it plays perfectly except that in the video settings it says that the planetary battles require directx 9.0b but that I have an older version of that. However this is simply not true, I checked dxdiag and it says 9.0c!

So when I was offered by someone in the game to do what I believe was a planetary battle the option to choose to do it was greyed out/inaccessible to me. When I chose some random other response the space monster said that he would inform my ranger station that they shouldn't offer those types of missions to me anymore.

Great, so now I not only have to figure out how to fix it so I can actually play the planetary battles (RTS battles), but I also may have to start a new game to get the option.

Can anyone give me some advice on what I could do to get the game to recognize that I have a later version?

And are the planetary battles actually important to do/profitable? It's been too long since I've played this little gem, I forgot a lot of stuff ...

(BTW I am playing the Reboot version from steam, not the GOG version ... sorry GOG, I will atone for my sins henceforth!)

Is it possible that you have the resolution for the RTS portion set too high for your netbook? The main game goes up to 1024x768 but, IIRC, the RTS part will do 1280x960 or somesuch. I also found that the RTS switches the game from windowed mode to fullscreen, which is interesting since some of us, myself included, can only launch the game using windowed mode.

No, I set the resolution to 800x600 for both the RTS part and the regular video options.

Anyway, it doesn't seem like I'm missing much by not playing the RTS part since there's so much else to do, but it's just a weird issue that the game cannot recognize I have a higher directx version than it requires.

Hey thanks, you are right it never hurts to be sure because installing this solved the issue!:)

That'll teach me to blindly trust dxdiag.

Glad you got it working! DirectX can be tricky because there are so many components... you might have had the 9.0c version of DirectSound but not Direct3D or something like that. Installing the full package is always a good idea, and it fixes quite a few problems with GOGs.

I have found out the hard way that sometimes Microsoft makes changes to DirectX without changing the version number. I had a game that wouldn't play because I was missing a DLL. A little research showed Microsoft added that DLL to DirectX 9c but they didn't up the version number of DirectX even though they changed it! Reinstalling DirectX 9c, just like Waltorious suggested here, solved that problem.