faktyczny: I have the same problem, help.

edit: I found a solution. Install the game outside of Program Files. Eg D: \ Games \ alien \ The Nations Gold

przelucki_andrew: Works properly on Fedora Linux under Wine. I'm using Fedora 31 KDE spin with all relevant Wine packages. I can use the troubleshooter as well to set max settings and get 1280x720 resolution.

The game is unplayable on Windows, horrific framerates and that flickering cursor. I tried to tweak the game on Windows a lot, but never worked, so this is the first time I'm able to finally play this wonderful game since I bought it over a year ago.

mpd12: I think I got it working. These are the steps I used:

1) Right-click on the game shortcut and disable the compatibility mode (I think the GOG version is set to Windows 98 mode when first installed) . I still ran the program as an administrator

2) Goto 'tools.exe' located in '[installed directory]/tools', select 'Troubleshooting' and the last option on the pull-down menu ['Benutzerdefiniert' / User Defined]. I had the texture limit set to 4000 and fixed the resolution to my native display [1920 x 1080] and left AGP Texture Memory to 'On'.*

3) Download DDrawCompat from the Github page. I can't post links but just Google 'DDrawCompat' and you'll find it. I used v0.3.0.

4) Copy the 'ddraw.dll' file from the downloaded archive to '[installed directory]/bin' and launch the game.

The cursor still flickers a bit, however the black square problem has been solved and the overall experience feels much more playable.

* I don't think the AGP Textures option affects anything, however setting the texture limit to infinite created problems.

narzoul: Is the cursor still flickering with DDrawCompat v0.3.1? It was supposed to be fixed there. See the related issue here: https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/issues/91

Maybe it can still happen with a high polling rate mouse, but I don't have any gamer mouse for testing. And since I've upgraded my system to new hardware and Windows 11, I can't reproduce the flickering even with v0.3.0...