1) As the sticky at the top notes, installing it to the standard location, with a nice short filename, will fix the crash to desktop when you load a mission. This is the standard install location from the standalone installer, but not from GOG Galaxy. :(

2) When you enter the game, you're stuck in it until you quit. ALT-TAB, CTRL-ESC and the Windows key do not work. On any modern multitasking computer system, this is completely unacceptable.

Having said that, I love Chaos Gate and it's great to be able to play it again after all these years. 1) is easy enough to fix by uninstalling and reinstalling from the standalone installer. Please please please fix 2)!

Hey there,

you can use the task manager to get out of the game - the usual CTRL-ALT-DEL works. After you´re done doing whatever you were doing, you can just click the game icon in the task bar to jump back in. Graphics *might* get funky until the game gets to load a new screen (though that´s not guaranteed), so use this only when you really need to. It´s a bit of a heavy-handed workaround, but it works fine for me so far.

This is a game from the days of Windows 95, and the hilariously antiquated version of DirectX it ran on wasn't even a piece of Microsoft software at the time! It's a minor miracle that games like this ran on Windows at all, and that's only because DirectX literally hijacked the entire system away from Windows (that is what DirectX was designed to do, so that games could work on Windows systems).

So, Windows functionality was effectively suspended while the game was running, so the system could devote as close to 100% of its resources on making the game run smoothly. I don't have any particular insight into the techno-sorcery GoG performs to animate these decrepit, mummified corpses of 90s PC games, but it frankly does not surprise me that Win 7/Win 8 functionality is very limited while Chaos Gate is running. It's just the price you pay for getting these old fossils to run properly - they never played nice with Windows, and just because Windows and DirectX are a lot sleeker today doesn't mean games like Chaos Gate will ever be any more agreeable. They simply run on a framework that grew out of DOS-based games where the assumption was that the application had a lot of low-level access to the system, which today is now more heavily restricted by Windows.

tl,dr; It's unreasonable to expect a game like this to play nice with modern Windows. It's like expecting a refurbished 1920s biplane to have a jet engine.