Well, as one of the mods has said, with the billions of possible hardware and software configurations, some people (the minority) are bound to run into issues. It's just PC gaming in general. And the system requirements are above the user reviews.

No need to rollback drivers on an ATI rig. Just used the solution explained in other thread, install ATI Tray Tools, and check Alternate Pixel Centers, so problem fixed.

I uninstalled the newer nVidia video drivers and went with the 280.26 drivers downloaded from:
http://www.evga.com/support/download/default.aspx
as suggested.
It worked.
Thanks for those who shared that info.
Oh I also added:
-32bit -noplaycine -hardmouse
to the end of the exe file.
All is well.
I am liking the game so far . . .
:)

Thanks machaira - The Nvidia 280.26 drivers worked perfectly!! They are from 04/2011, so not a big deal because my 9600 GT is much older than that.

That's just sad. A six dollar, ten year old game should be able to run on XP with an nVidia GPU. If it CAN'T, then THAT should be listed among the system requirements. "Billions of possible" my bleeding piles. I repeat, the core customer base doesn't swing by here every two days looking for something to max out all four CPUs and both GPUs. They want something that works with trailing edge hardware. That's the market, and that's why the first ten comments on any New! GOG.com! Release! are always concerned with whether it's a functional (and economical) improvement over the same title six months ago on Steam.

I don't care either way. I'm not a shareholder. It's just amusing to watch, like giving a dog a mouth full of peanut butter and seeing if he figures it out. So far, the dog hasn't figured out Darkstone, and doesn't seem keen on figuring it out. Believe it or not, people will pay for information like that. I mean, it beats selling WoW trinkets on Ebay. "The whole world is watching," n00bs.

So I'm assuming you won't be purchasing any more GOG games or old games anywhere else?

Good to hear. I guess people can overreact at some points. And the truth is: when dissatisfied, one usually tells others about it; if no issues were encountered, then nothing is reported at all. Isn't that true?

You can see what some of the mods (blue text) have to say here. http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/the_silver_case


The team makes sure the games work on at least 30 machines of various hw/sf combinations before allowing the release. But a percentage of people will always have issues with games, and presumably the more sold, the more percentage will post in that forum; it doesn't mean NOBODY can get the game working.

For a little context, there was some GOG sales information a little while back that suggested Legend of Grimrock had sold 20, 000 copies, and any title sorted by "best seller" had sold at least that much too (Fallout, Dungeon Keeper 2, Master of Orion, Alpha Centauri, etc.) (IIRC, Witcher 2 had sold at least 40,000 copies). Of course, you don't see 20, 000 complaints in the various sub-forums.

I'm running xp with a Nivia GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card and had this flickering problem until I rolled back my driver to a previous one and that fixed it. All I did was to click on the rollback driver tab and then reboot my computer when prompted..

And give up beer and skittles money? Six bucks written down on expenses, an hour replicating other people's results, and two weeks' rent done and dusted? Competing DRM-free vendors think they're exploiting my labor value and I think they're throwing silver dollars from a hot air balloon. No, if it's okay with you, I'll keep on with the market research. I mean, I'm up front about it. Who's going to say I'm playing foul? I do in fact pay for the games, remember.

Well, rolled my driver back and Darkstone ran great, but youtube caused BSOD with infinite loop in Nv4 according to event view. I'm back to the newer driver and just hope for an update for the game. It is a really fun game and hopefully it gets figured out.

Open a youtube video, right click > Settings > Hardware acceleration - Disable

=)

Thanks, but I'm going to stick with the newer driver. There was another problem with my system hanging for around 30 seconds randomly and that problem is also gone with the newer driver. I need this system mainly for work. I will just borrow the 15-year-old's Win 7 computer or maybe use my Vista laptop to play this game :)

I just downloaded the game tonight, and found that I have the same problem (Windows XP SP3, Nvidia GTX 260). I had some older drivers laying around, and downloaded a few more to fill in the gaps, so I could generate the following updated working/not-working driver version results:

2.85.58 works
2.90.53 works (release date: December 21, 2011)
2.95.51 fails
3.06.81 fails
3.10.70 fails (release date: December 04, 2012)

So, it looks like 2.90.53 is probably the last working version (I didn't continue exhaustively trying versions once I found the first one that failed, and it's still broken 1 year later). The 2.90.53 release notes say that it supports cards up through the GTX 590 and ION, so any cards newer than that are out of luck for Darkstone on XP.

As frustrated as I am, I can't blame GoG for this one. The blame for this one rests entirely on NVIDIA.

Doesn't work here on GTX 650Ti , 310.90 drivers. The same flickering problem. That sucks, because I don't want to roll back my drivers..and it's such a great game!