Whenever I boot up the game, the colours are strange and distorted, with the main menu appearing as a dark purple/reddish mess. This does not go away on moving into different parts of the game (in-game encyclopedia, battle map etc). I understand this is a common problem for Win 98/XP era games on Windows 7.

I've tried booting from all of the applicable files in the folders, nada. I've tried applying a couple of patches from other sites, none of which work.

For information, I'm running Windows 7 64 bit, with an AMD Radeon 6400M graphics card using AMD catalyst drivers. Any help would be much appreciated.

Same issue. I also have an AMD card, a Radeon HD 7850. I also have the issue with TIE Fighter. I read something about killing the explorer.exe process but I couldn't tab back to TIE Fighter so I didn't try with this one. I also read about updating my drivers to the beta drivers to fix it but I'm concerned that might break other applications. Beta drivers, after all.

I use a simple batch file to kill the explorer.exe process, run a game and then restart explorer.exe for any game I run into with this problem (e.g. Austin Powers Pinball, StarCraft, etc.):

------ Start Code ------
@ECHO OFF
REM Kill explorer.exe
TASKKILL /F /IM explorer.exe

REM Insert command to start the program
Starcraft.exe

REM Restart explorer.exe
start explorer.exe
------ End Code ------

Just replace starcraft.exe with the start command for Galactic Battlegrounds (or whatever other game) and save the .bat file in the same folder as the game. For StarCraft, I named the file sc.bat and updated the shortcut to point to the batch file. Works pretty well for most of the games that have this problem. =)

Flynn

Or you could turn off Explorer.

Oh, ninjad. :P

The number of times I've been ninja'd in various forums, it feels good to finally ninja someone, heh.

Flynn

Someone of your excellent taste (as is evident by your login and avatar) deserves to feel good and should walk tall and proud, regardless of what or whom gets in your way. :D

Yup, I sorted it by updating my graphics card drivers. Derp. Latest AMD drivers seem to have this problem solved.

Doing the other steps (shutting down explorer etc., changing how it boots) won't stop it.

Aw, shucks. Made me blush... =D

Flynn

You can try turning off "Morphological Filtering" in the Catalyst Control Center. That setting causes issues with older games.

This fixed it for me, too.

Testing this AMD update. Hopefully this works. Otherwise I will cry inside :(


Works! As if :D

A lot of games had this issue with Windows versions from Vista on. It has to de with the way post XP Windows refreshed the color display. There are workarounds, but it's nice to have the problem fixed for Battlegrounds.

Win 7 64

GOG SWGB + Clone Wars worked fine for awhile. Then with an update to Catalyst, frikkin color distortion comes back! Not only that, but killing explorer DOESN'T FIX IT!!! (Oddly, XvT and XWA are fine - so is Interplay Star Trek games)

OK looks like it was MORPHOLOGICAL FILTERING needed to be OFF under: Gaming / 3D application settings in catalyst control center.

Now SWGB looks normal again. For a change.

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to add a new fix I've found. I've tried every patch online, I updated my AMD driver, I killed explorer a gazillion times but nothing worked. What did worked was this program called "DXWnd". It's a small soft that look to work with several old games.

The sourceforge link is (http://)
sourceforge.net/projects/dxwnd/
And a tutorial (because the developer didn't explain how the hell the program works) here: (http://www.)
play-old-pc-games.com/compatibility-tools/using-dxwnd/

Btw, when importing a game profile, I've used the AOE II and it works perfectly.

Hope someone finds it helpful.

bye!