Hello.
I installed the games and started MoO from the "installation complete" launcher. Everything worked perfect until I heard I got a Gtalk message so I quit MoO (Quit to Dos.), answered the message and started MoO again with the desktop shortcut. That got me DosBox MoO in a window. Then I tried the shortcut on the start meny with the same result.
Might this be a Vista 64bit, DosBox or MoO problem? Any help would be appreciated.

As one possible tweak to the above, using "output = ddraw" can sometimes be helpful.

And if none of that works, it is possible to run MOO2 on a Win7 system without DOSBox. It will be truly full screen, which, depending on monitor settings, will result in aspect ratio distortion. I run it on a 1920x1024 monitor and actually like it that way.

The trick to it is that you have to kill explorer.exe to throw the system into it's native CGA support mode, run the game, then restart explorer.exe upon exit. This can be done with a script. The one I use is below. It also sets processor affinity to restrict the game to a single CPU core. MOO2 was designed well before multi-core CPUs became common and can be a bit tweaky on very fast mult-processor systems. The problem seems to be the use of software timing loops. The cursor will blink so fast that it's hard to get it to take input.

To use the script, modify the path to point to the original MOO2 program files on your system.Drop the batch file on your desktop. It will kill explorer, launch the game, then restart explored on game exit. Will also work on Vista and might work on Win8l, but not tried.

The script below is short and simple, but as always, be wary of creating scripts from unknown third parties on your system. Others can comment if there are any security concerns.

And finally, if you get an error about dplay.dll being missing you will need to go to Windows\System32 (x86) or Windows\SysWOW64 (x64), make a copy of dplayx.dll, rename it dplay.dll, and drop it in the same folder.

You can find more detail on this in the Windows7 forums.

Orion2.bat
--------------
TASKKILL /F /IM "explorer.exe"
cd C:\"Program Files (x86)"\Microprose\Orion2
start /affinity 1 /w Orion95.exe
start C:\Windows\explorer.exe

I installed MOO 2 and the startup screen comes on... and that's it.

If I click the game menu, the bottom four items highlight and the credits start to roll. Clicking does nothing but stop the credits.

I have heard "cycles" can be increased by hitting CTRL+F12, but that this only works in Windowed Mode; alas, my game won't go into windowed mode.

Clearly I am doing something wrong, but I have no idea what it might be.,

If you use GoG Galaxy you can easily go to More - Graphic Mode Setup and disable fullscreen and choose between the different Graphic Modes.

If you dont use Galaxy go to MOO2 directory and use Dosbox Configuration there and fiddle around a bit and see if it helps