So I bough Arcanum a short while ago and upon booting it up, noticed the godawful resolution that the game had with it and the fact that when I tried to start it up as it was, after the opening cutscene finished, the game just showed my inventory with a black loading screen as the dude who thought I was the messiah or something blathered on. I tired installing the unofficial patch, high quality townmaps, high quality music and the resolution patch (all of which I can't do anymore, as when trying to use the links to those patches it just takes me round in a loop to the page I was using to get to the links in the first place) and the game ran like shit, an utterly laggy mess. Then I tried to mess around with the ddraw files or something, like various forums had advised me to, and now I cannot get past the menu, because the game won't let me click on anything, it won't shut itself down so my computer has to restart in order to try and test it again, there's this little blue box that appears next to the tiny menu and I don't know what to do now. Please, for fuck's sake, help me, Ijust want to be able to play this game properly.

And yes, I'e uninstalled it multiple times, that hasn't done shit.

verify your game files through gog galaxy then take arcanum.exe from hires/backup folder replace the one in main folder then extract hi res patch which u can download from a few sites if u just keep clicking buttons extract folder hi res to main directory run uninstall bat then install community patch then run install.bat then open config.ini and make sure dxcompat flag is set to on as this is what is causing your game to go all weird and seize up then go to library borrow book Ulysses by James Joyce it will probably read quite cleanly to you but even that guy used a fucking full stop once in a while :-)

Hold on - where is my hires/backup folder exactly?

Okay, I've gone through with your advice, but now I can't get the resolution patch to run (every other patch works fine) so the borders are quite annoying. And I am worried that if I do get itworking, it's going to result in a shit-ton of lag, just like before. So how can I get the oatch to run, what are it's prerequisites, and how can I prevent lag without repeating the whole bloody cyle again?