Strangely, I bought and played Sanitarium with few troubles save for a crashing situation in The Cave but moving the performance up to one ] from best performance fixed that. Beyond that, after some hours of playing the game the pause menu liked to go all sorts of bizarre, corrupted looking rainbow colors. I've seen SC1 do this before on it's menu and wasn't too worried.

So happy with classic gaming and GOG in general I also purchased Outcast. I played around with the patch for HD resolutions and got that working, though for a spell the game liked to flicker in black screens, as though a frame had failed to load at random intervals every 20 to 40 seconds. I honestly forget what I did to fix it. I then happily played both games for ages.

Unfortunately both games have begun to have random interval flickering of a black frame and it's driving me nuts. I had flawless play in the range of 4 or 5 hours in Sanitarium and 9 or so in Outcast. The problem is virtually identical in each one. Curious about this, wondering if it was a hardware failure issue I've just played Fallout New Vegas for several hours and despite being substantially more demanding I had no black frames flicker. Sanitarium and Outcast both just gave me the problem again.

I'm running Windows Vista home x64.
Motherboard is a BIOSTAR TA790GXE 128M.
Processor AMD Phenom II X4 940 Processor 3.0GHz
4 gigs of I think it's Skil RAM
GPU is an ATI Radeon HD4850 if memory serves.
DirectX 10

I run Windows update so Vista should be current version.

No idea what's causing this infuriating issue, but I'd really appreciate any help that can be given.

EDIT: I am APPALLED at my topic title. I'm very worn out and apparently just not able to use anything resembling correct English or even a glance to see it read ok. Wow.

Also, I'd like to add that running the game in 256 color mode with Disable Visual Themes checked for compatibility makes the black flickers less common and also keeps the characters on the screen during the flicker. Odd.