I recently tried the Hardware Acceleration patch on

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=41331

and, of course, it didn't work. The game crashed when hardware had been selected.

BUT

the flickering when using my volume up/down keys was gone and so was the the system clock, which appeared from time to time.

So: If you are troubled by flickering, try those patches (works for TIE and X-Wing). Just don't use hardware acceleration.

I have to add something:

After using the patch I discovered that my framerate became somewhat choppy. So I restored the original exe and guess what: The framerate was back to normal.

So there seems to be another reason for GOGs hardware acceleration deactivation. At least on my setup (Windows 8.1 with GTX 770).