Just bought and downloaded the game. I have a Win 7 (64) machine.

I get the black screen error as well. When I skip the movies at the beginning and get to the main menu of the game, I can see and move the game curser, but not the menu screen itself. If I alt-tab out of the game and back again, the screen is refreshed. So, if I press the "Options" button, nothing changes on the screen. If I then tab out of the game and back in again, I can see the options menu, but as before, the graphics are frozen.

Sometimes, when I change the graphics resolution (by doing a lot of alternately clicking and then alt-tabbing), a randow number of horizontal lines of pixels are "unfrozen", so that I can see the graphics change as they should, but only in these few lines of pixels, while the rest of the screen is still frozen.

I tried once to change the graphics cursor settings from Hardware to Software, but doing that just included the curser in the bug, so that the curser graphics were frozen with the rest of the screen.

I have tried the solutions suggested by previous posters, but none of them works for me.

I hope that some of this information might give someone a bright idea about how to get rid of this bug.

Anyone found anything out yet? I just bought this game today only to find myself trying to figure out how to get it running properly for hours. Changing From R2 to R1 doesnt work for either sr1 or 2. Not buying reboot just to play through a window. There's gotta be a way to play it without having to but another game.

I'm on a Toshiba Sattellite btw.

So no solutions yet aside from buying SR:Reboot from someone else?

Is no-one else a bit miffed that this game was listed as Windows 7 compatible when clearly there are a bunch of us that can't play the game on that OS?

I only have issues when my battery profile in Win7 isn't set to High Efficiency. At any other battery profile I see the same black screen and cursor as many have reported previously. Have any of you tried that (if you are on a laptop, of course)?

It does work on Windows 7 for most people. I have it installed on 3 different machines with different hardware specs (all Win7 64 bit) and it runs perfectly (aside from intro video). Unfortunately with the millions of different hardware components and configurations in PCs it's impossible for any publisher to guarantee compatibility with every single machine that can run Win7.

Something that may be useful to check for those having issues - is your hardware able to go into 800x600 and/or 1024x768 full screen mode? Try using some other game (I'm sure there's plenty of older freeware / demos you could use for this) and see if they have an issue.

I am on a laptop. I tried the "Power saver" mode and got a blank screen, that I was able to refresh using Alt-Tab. On "High performance" and "Balanced" I get frozen game screens instead of black.

Yes, my hardware seems to handle both resolutions just fine. I recently played "The Witcher" at both resolutions.

I tried forcing SR2 into a window using DxWnd, but the game started fullscreen nonetheless no matter what settings I tried.

The game plays the intro movie just fine, and seems to render the game screens with no trouble either. It just doesn't update the screen...

I'm aware that there is a high diversity of OSes and hardware. It's hard for me to say if most people can play this under Windows 7, but I'll take your word for it. At what point does GOG put an asterisk on the product page, though? 1 in 10 purchasers? 1 in 100?

Try downloading Oracle VirtualBox. It's a free software that allows you to create and run virtual machines (emulated computers). Create a new VM and install some kind of Windows on it, then try to run SR2 in there (while VirtualBox is set to windowed mode, not full screen). SR2's full screen will take up only the full VirtualBox (so it'll essentially be in window on your host system).

It's involved but if nothing else works, it may be the thing to fix it.

Thanks for the idea, thanknspank.

I think I'll throw in the towel on this one and pay $7 for Reboot elsewhere rather than keep struggling to get SR2 from gog to work on my laptop. Not worth the aggravation!

There is currently a giveaway of the complete Space Rangers package, including the Reboot version of SR2, which should fix the problems for at least some folks. The thread is here:

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/space_rangers_complete_giveaway

Good luck!

Hi - has anyone found a solution to this yet? I've got exactly the same problem that others have reported, with black screen being which updates on Alt Tab.

Just a quick note of feedback THANKS for helping.

I was trying to run SR2 on a netbook with win 7 starter.

First - complete crash...so I "ran as administrator" and changed to "win xp sp3 compatibility mode".

Then - dx9 file is missing, so I downloaded the "Jun2010 redist" of DirectX and installed.

Working now ...except the blank screen+cursor problem.

So I edited the CFG.TXT file in the main SR2 directory to "windowed=yes" and "videomode=R1"

Now I can play it perfectly on my little netbook - thanks again

Yeah, windowed mode 800x600 works for my win7 laptop. works just fine on my old junker computer with win 7 without it all. choices... tiny awesome laptop, or full screen, kinda slow junker.

There is a little simple solution! Found it just now. All you need is to download archive and extract into your game folder. Then you just start Rangers.exe as you usually do. No patching, no malware :D
http://www.mediafire.com/?6yhf2z27ku97o86

I had problems with the game on Windows 8, the game would not start and it only gave me blank screen. The solution was to run the game in Windows 98 compability mode, now it works!