I've tried contacting GOG support, but the expected response time is anywhere up to a couple of weeks, so I decided to see if anyone here could help me.

I recently bought AoW, AoW2, and Shadow Magic, and downloaded Galaxy to manage installation and my library. I've downloaded AoW, tried to run it, uninstalled and reinstalled.

The game's audio runs fine, but nothing displays. Any time I try to click on the game on my toolbar it briefly shows a compressed, doubled, eye-searing screen for a split second, presumably the color maps separated, and then exits and goes beck to desktop. But the game is still running. The sound is running fine, But actually going to the game is impossible. Furthermore, when I try to access the settings option in the launcher, It displays an error message that says "access violation at address 00443878 in module 'aowsetup.exe'. Read of address: 00000000."

I'm frustrated and don't know what to do, and whether this might happen with any of the other older games I've bought on GOG, like Dungeon Keeper or Warcraft.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

First suggestion for all games on Gog, don't allow the installer to install in the program files directory. Create a directory of c://games and install everything there. This makes a huge difference for permissions and running stuff on modern computers.

I see. I hadn't done that before, since the last time I downloaded from GOG was years ago. Do you think that's the main problem?

EDIT: This worked! The game now functions! However, after closing the settings the first time since I couldn't leave the executable, it now does the error again, and I can't alter my display settings.

I'll try those tomorrow. Thank you for the suggestions!