all starts well but after trying to create a sandbox game I have the normal animation then black screen and quit. Can you help me please ?

Same problem-occurs whether sandbox, scenario, campaign or tutorial start. Goes to black screen and quits. Win 7. Have run it as administrator-changed compatability from XP(default) to WIn 7 to Win 98-ME-verified/reinstalled all to no avail. Any solutions or info?

Problem solved see below hopefully.

I found a work around-Look in your gog.com game directory where ever that is on your machine-
find the Tropico 2 directory/folder open it-look for a file called Tropico 2 Safe Mode.bat. Double click on it-the game will start. Then go into any game mode and start a game. It should run. Tou can then change all the settings that you want such as resolution etc. Then exit the game. You should now be able to start the game normally from this point on. If not you can always play from safe mode but you have to change preferred settings every time.

I had the same problem. Thanks for the tips.

I located the line in the ini file that was causing the crash on my computer :

SoftwareDevice=0

under the "ddraw" section. The game could probably not use my graphic card.
Setting this value to 1 solved my problem.

That got it working for me, thanks!