Solved (at least for me)

What we share is NVidia graphic card, so I guessed the driver was the cause of flashing screen. So I uninstalled the latest one (296.10) for 9600GT, then installed the oldest one that I had (266.58). That's it. The game is working silky now.

(FYI: before that, I gave it a try that putting /usepmtimer on boot.ini, no luck, nothing changed, though.)

Hopefully, this post would be some kind of help for you guys.
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EDIT: BTW, I tried ver.285.58 driver and the game also worked fine without the flickers this time.
I have no idea why only ver.296.10 causes the problem.
Good luck.

I can confirm 285.58 (stable) as clearing up the flicker for me, at least through the startup sequence. Yay for regression updates, eh?

Confirming. It worked now. Tsk, initially I was only one update ahead of needed one! :D

yep, rolling back worked on my nvidia card too, so thanks for the fix everyone

I would like to add that I was having the flashing white screen issue. I also had the 296.10 driver version. I tried updating to 301.42, still had the issue so then I tried installing progressively older versions until I installed 285.58 and everything appears to be fixed.

Some brief info computer info (more available to anyone investigating further):
Athlon64 X2, NVIDIA 9500GT, Windows XP service pack 3 (WinXP SP3), NVIDIA display driver 296.10

Thank you everyone. I was looking for some screen problem (not the flashing one) and this fixed too my problem (the -DIB thing arfter target in shortcut).

My problem was about the resolution. No matter what you choose in the setup (1X, 2X, 3X or Full Screen Size) it keeps showing just original (tiny) size with the resf of the screen just blank or white stuff.

Anyways, the -DIB argument worked really good, and I'm so happy now.

I attached two screen shots showing before and after fix.

Thank you Sangadoria

Thank you Ventuz, your reply was most interesting since you pointed in the "Multimedia Fusion" direction.

I did some research and here I post some command line options I found on a Steam Forum.

Thank you again.. here is the list...

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There are some command options that might help,

I believe these are universal for all Multimedia Fusion games;

-D3D9 => use directX 9 (default)
-D3D8 => use directX 8
-NOVR => no VRAM in DirectDraw mode
-DEBUG => displays graphic mode in title bar
-MIS0 => disables the Machine Independent Speed option
-MIS1 => forces the Machine Independent Speed option
-NOF => runs in windowed mode
-NOC => prevents images from being compressed in memory (for internal test)
-NOX => disables Alt+F4
-NOK => disables the Keep Screen Ratio option (in full screen mode)
-VSYNC => forces V-Sync ON (default)

These are the most likely to crash so probably not worth trying;

-DIB => forces standard graphic mode
-DIB3 => forces standard graphic mode, 256 colors
-DIB4 => forces standard graphic mode, 16 millions of colors, 24 bits
-DIB6 => forces standard graphic mode, 32768 colors
-DIB7 => forces standard graphic mode, 65536 colors
-DIB8 => forces standard graphic mode, 16 millions of colors, 32 bits
-DDRAW => forces DirectDraw + VRAM mode

Thank you Sangadoria. This fixed pretty much everything.

You're most probably brilliant and smart

Thank you once again

Cheers

Great reply, from you trying to replicate the problem so to help people to fix it...

I have Nvidia 6800 GT on a Windows XP SP3.

After investigating and trying different options (see previous post for Multimedia Fusion command line options),

I discovered the problem in my case it was an inconsistency between Game color Depth and Windows Desktop Color Depth.

Game was trying to run in 32 bit color, Windows was configured for 16 bit color.

If I change the Game options for 16 bit color (-DIB or -DIB7) it fixs the problem

or,

If I change Windows Desktop color to 32 bit it fix the problem as well.

Thank you,

have a good day.

I'm running Windows XP Service Pack 3 on the laptop, with Intel embedded graphics.
It took me about 35 tries to get the game to run so that I could play it, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit now.

The first issue was the resolution. The game would start, but in a large white box with only a tiny little area in the upper left displaying the (full) graphics of the game. It was so small that, while legible, it was sort of painful to read. And all that white space! (I didn't figure out how to fix this until later)

But I figured that at least I could *see* the game, so I figured I'd try it, before I jumped into troubleshooting the graphics properties. Immediately there was the issue with not being able to select anything from the start menu. Eventually, through trial and error, I figured out that "Z" is the action button by default.

So! I was about to start a new game. But the game begins with a long intro scene aboard a boat in a thunderstorm. With the window its current size, the boat was only a vaguely lighter triangle on a dark background. Then the scene ends with the dad berating the kid for not getting out of the boat (the text of the intro scene names three characters), but since I couldn't SEE any of the characters, I had to do some troubleshooting.

In looking up these community threads, I discovered some helpful facts about the game and how to alter its properties. First, if you right click the program shortcut and select "open file location," you'll see that there is another executable in the same directory as the game called "setup.exe." Run that, and you can both change the display mode and which keys do what. I set the pulldown to "full screen." That had no effect.

Then I came to this thread and started trying variations of command-line arguments, -DIB and such, singly and in combination. At first it didn't work, because I was altering the properties of the .exe file itself, rather than the shortcut on the desktop (whoops!)! Then it would work so that the game played full screen, and I could start the game, able to see all the characters. But after the interactive intro sequence is ended, you wake up in a hammock inside a house. As soon as you exit the house, I saw the same pale chartreuse screen that others have reported, with a ghastly pulsing black orb like a singularity above. The sound was working - I could hear the lapping of the waves - and the screen scrolled as I moved around, so clearly there was simply a graphics problem...still.

I tried many different combinations of command-line arguments. Each time I'd ALT+TAB and then close the program, make the edit, and relaunch it. Thankfully, the game auto-saves your progress after the intro sequence, so I didn't have to play through that sequence over and over, but I got to really despise that rolling gear logo.

Then I started messing with the compatibility modes (right click the actual .exe file > Properties > Compatibility tab, and started adding variations of those settings along with the command-line arguments. As I said in the beginning, I tried more than 30 times. There was never any change.

I then went and altered my graphics display color settings - sure enough, my graphics setting were set to 16 bit colors, rather than 32 bit. No change. But I still had a bunch of compatibility settings selected for the .exe file, and command-line arguments added to the shortcut. I started toying with the idea of back-leveling my DirectX version, as has been mentioned in this thread. But first I experimented by removing the changes I'd made, one at a time, until, suddenly, it started working!

Hooray! The game is actually quite fun!

Here's what ended up working for me:
Setup.exe: Fullscreen
Graphics properties set to 32 bit colors

That's it. All the other stuff - for me - was a distraction.

Edit: Which is to say that there are apparently multiple issues for different people, with different system setups. My solution ended up being the same as one suggested earlier (by osmanvielma), because I'd tried several others and it took me a long time to figure out that I had to remove all those other changes in order for it to work, I thought I'd share it just in case someone else has the same situation of trying some of the other solutions first.