Hey all, wondering if I could get a little help with Quake II. Downloaded it, earlier, installed fine; but when I come to load it up, via the GoG included loader, windows flickers a few times, I get a message on the status bar about my desktop scheme changing to 'basic', and then another flicker, and back to the desktop.

Trying to load directly via the Quake .exe gets me no response at all, apart from showing up for a couple of seconds in the task manager processes pane.

I've done some searching already, and the main fix seems to be 'get a source port.' Problem? Well yes, it seems like all the source ports I've tried require a degree in IT to work with.

I'm running on Win7, if that's any help.

Anyway. Any help would be -really- appreciated.

I've got the same problem on my Win10 laptop. I'm not at my PC right now so I can't offer easier instructions, but I also recommend a source port. Specifically, Yamagi Quake 2. It changes nothing directly about gameplay, only offers some additional options and increases compatibility with modern systems. From what I remember installation isn't complicated and it comes with understandable instructions.

I hope that helps, even though it's the answer you didn't want :)

You might want to try a modern Quake loader, such as ezquake. Just do a google search and follow the instructions, if this doesn't work contact support, they are there for this sort of stuff.

The download link for the Windows version is on this page and it points here (Yamagi Quake II 5.34 for Windows). There is no need to look at github if you are an end user.

Installation boils down to copy the quake 2 folder, delete everything except the .pak-files, players, video and music folders from the base directory and all subfolders (baseq2, rogue, xatrix and ctf) and then extract the zip file in the clean quake 2 folder.

This should get everything except the music working.

Haha, and here's me making it sound all technical. I'll give that a try. Thanks for the heads up!

I guess in theory you might also be able to just install Quake 2 from GOG, put the Yamagi files in the folder and play it that way. Just like with Quake 1 sourceports that are really "nothing more" than just an extra executable in the folder.

Either way, it shouldn't be much hassle and work out nicely, which I hope it does for you. Have fun :)


Although, I would still love to know why older OpenGL games like Quake 1 and 2 refuse to run on some modern systems. Has it got to do with the graphics cards? Windows 7/10? 64bit? I'd like to at least be able to start the games using the original files.

Latest GOG version includes 3.24 and Runs great on my Win10x64 desktop, FX-8320 cpu, Windows build 14986.1001, Crimson 16.12.2 ReLive drivers for my MSI R9 380 4GB. One interesting thing I have noticed is that for me Win10x64 is much more compatible than Win7 with older games--and even more compatible than Win8/.1.

Also, remember that the GPU driver is what includes the OpenGL driver, of course (unless it's included in the game--it is not included in my GOG version--but still, the drivers will include the newer version, anyway.). Beware of Intel GPUs (laptops, mainly) that are nowhere near as compatible as either AMD or nVidia GPUs (and of those two I favor AMD for have the best backwards compatibility.) Intel GPUs emulate a lot of hardware functions in software and some games expect them in hardware, etc.

The latest installer (setup_quake2_quad_damage_2.0.0.3.exe) has the official v3.20 patch, not the unofficial 3.24. On another note, Capture the Flag needs to be updated to v1.50.

At least Quake 2 and 3 engines (and many derivatives, e.g. daikatana) suffer from a simple buffer overflow bug that manifests as a crash with any GPU drivers that advertise a large number of OpenGL extensions.

I don't know if this is the same bug the OP is suffering (it kinda sounds like it might not be it). But this is a very common problem with these engines and a lot of old OpenGL games use these engines.

Some drivers (NVidia?) hilariously include a workaround whereby it doesn't advertise all these irrelevant extensions if the name of the executable requesting them is "quake2.exe". So, on Windows, using these specific drivers, some broken games can be "fixed" simply by renaming the executable.

That's great to hear AMD's drivers work too. Yeah, newest Nvidia drivers on Windows 10 Creator's Edition/whatever works fine (except music...)

I'm guessing Intel...?
That's great info...hopefully I'll remember that if I run into some game that has issues like that, rename it "quake2.exe" lol.

Weird that these games were ever coded where that could be a problem. I mean duh? (Although maybe the software version in this case would still work, since there is a software version?)

C code from the 90s is buffer overflows galore. It's a relatively common oversight to neglect some size check, and when the problem never triggers in production, it gets shipped, and bites us back a decade later.

I believe the problem in Quake 2 comes from VID_Printf which is used to print the OpenGL extension string to the console, among other things. The function has a fixed length buffer to hold a formatted copy of the string. Unfortunately the code uses vsprintf to do the formatting, and vsprintf has no way to know how large the buffer is, thus assuming it is large enough. So it overflows the buffer and crashes.

In the programmers' defense, it is actually quite difficult to verify the length of a string that would result out of vsprintf. In essence you would actually have to reimplement vsprintf for yourself. Of course there are better APIs now, but this code hails from the 90s and they were trying to be portable. The better APIs were not standard back in the day; vsnprintf was only standardised in C99 (that's after the release of all the original three quakes) and vasprintf is another nonstandard extension.

https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2/blob/372afde46e7defc9dd2d719a1732b8ace1fa096e/null/vid_null.c#L20

This particular bug is fairly easy to work around though so I'm a little disappointed GOG doesn't distribute patched binaries or patches for it.

that's dissapointing. Game that doesn't work, but you still have to pay for it...

Just extract Yamagi to your q2 folder and you should be good to go.