For ages I've had the Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2 discs and for months on my Win 7 machine I was having the problem of the screen flashing every 2 seconds in fullscreen mode which made it very unpleasant to play. I bought the GOG version of RCT1 but that didn't fix anything.

Fix: I am pretty sure my problem was with my ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. How I fixed the problem was first I updated my drivers. Then when I ran it as an administrator the flash was gone, but only as an administrator.

I thought I'd fill you in if you are having the same problem. When I get around to finding my RCT2 disc I'll fill you in about if it fixed that game too.

EDIT: The game stopped working a few days later.

I tried what you said and it didn't work for me :(

The game used to work fine, then I upgraded my HD and reinstalled everything and its only since then that I've had the flashing black bars. Has anybody else had any luck?

It's broken again for me. :( It only fixed it for a few days, now I can't get it working. I've had this problem for ages, though not about a year ago on this system. Sometimes I can fix it and I get real excited, then a few days later it stops working again and I'm back at square one.

Update: I just tried ending the process tree on 'explorer.exe' after I opened the game and that seemed to work for me. It's kind of a hassle though. You have to log out and in to get the start menu and desktop back.

You can just rerun explorer.exe again from the task manager again, instead of reloggining in.

Ctrl+Shift+Esc - Open task manager

"Applications" tab-> "New Task" button, then open explorer

I know this reply is more than a few months behind. But I have found that if I alt+tab out of the game it will fix the flashes. I only get the screen flash about 2% of the time I play the game, so it could be an unrelated issue. Hope this helps!

Running as administrator seems to fix the flashes for me. The issue I've been getting is that windows behind the game would occasionally flash through for a brief frame or two. Very annoying. I was able to fix it by ALT+TABing out and minimizing every single window. That, or running the game as administrator fixed my issue. I hope this helps someone.

I'm on Windows 8.1 with an NVIDIA GTX 770 and the Witcher 3 Game Ready drivers 352.86

I know this post is several years old, but this could be a simpler solution than manually doing that every time you want to run RCT using the same trick as with the Master of Orion 2 windows executable. Make a new text file in your RCT directory and write the following (substitue the RCT.exe line with the actual name of the RCT executable):

taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
RCT.exe
Start explorer.exe

Then rename the file from "New Text Document.txt" to "RCT.bat" (without the ", and remember to delete the .txt) and say yes to changing the type. You can now double click on the RCT.bat file and it will kill explorer, run RCT and finally restart once you've quit RCT.