First two logo vids., then black screen and music. That's all. I've tried various things over and over again. Sometimes when I hit ctrl alt del the opening video comes in but other windows fade in and out and it's too ugly to play with nor does it ever get to the actual game. Whatever it is that's doing this is probably very simple buy I am not knowledgable about these things at all.

I've read through threads here, and I've tried reading through threads at World of Gothic but the information they have seems terribly complicated. I'm fairly new to computer games and didn't really know that it would take so much time and energy to get certain games to play. If this is going to take another 10-20 hours of tinkering I don't think I want any part of it anymore. It's a truly terrible thing, but I do have somewhat of a life.

xp sp 3
geforce fx 5200
amd athlon 3200
onboard realtek sound card
1gb ram
virus protection off
antialias off
scale video - 0

All drivers up to date. Latest directx with some pack thing that has previous ones as well.

I also patched the game with 2.1 community (I'm thinking it's probably for win 7 but I'm not sure) and have tried to delete all the bits and pieces after uninstalling the game and am no longer able to install 2.1. Right now I have 1.0 installed. I also tried the german 2.6 but that would not install. When I did have 2.1 installed I had an error that said something about my video card I think but I don't remember now.

A tip about the patch: get the manual installer for 2.10, or play it without the patch. Despite being released in so many versions, the community patch is still a bit of a mess. The manual installer is a .rar containing three folders; you really only want one of the folders. I think it's called "work."

(more details on the patch's three folders.
1. bug fixes and camera patch. "work" folder, I think.
2. a texture pack
3. some dlls that you shouldn't use and an outdated german exe that you shouldn't use unless you want to play mods.)