I'm wanting to take a stab at playing though the X series from the start and am trying to get X: Tension to run. I am using Windows 10 Pro. My other system specs if they're important are CPU: Ryzen 3600, RAM: 32GB, GPU: GeForce GTX 1070.

When I run the game, I get a brief moment of it showing a black 640x480 area in the topleft of my screen, then a couple of very brief flickers of a fully black screen, before returning to desktop - the game stays on the taskbar for a second or so and then disappears.

An important thing to mention is that I can get X:BTF to run fine. I'm trying to start with XTension since I guess it includes the XBTF content along with the expansion additions, and I thought if XBTF worked, so would XT with no fuss - but I guess not!

I installed DirectPlay and that didn't change anything. I've also set compatibility options on the X-TENSION.exe to match what is recommended on the Egosoft forum (that is, run with Windows 7 compatibility).

The problem happens regardless of how the three options are set in the launcher. It also happens just the same whether I start the game through the X-TENSION.exe or through runme.exe (not sure if this is a GOG thing or not).

I'm at a bit of a loss, so any help would be appreciated.

Do you mean that the game won't run even in windowed mode?

Have you checked the Window Event Viewer for any information regarding the crash?

As far as I know, X: Beyond the Frontier and X-Tension share the same engine, hence if the former runs correctly, your system should handle the latter without problems: that's why I suspect there is something wrong with the configuration of the game.

Yeah, this is what I found surprising too, but that's computers for you I guess...

I missed out the full detail about windowed mode. That won't run, but it does give a clear error message "Windowmode only possible with 16 bit desktop" before quitting. I don't believe it's possible to get Win10 to do that. I did try adding a compatibility setting on the exe to run in reduced colour mode (16-bit) but no difference.

Perhaps if I had a way of editing the game settings outside of the ingame options menu then I could tell it to use 32-bit colour instead. When I ran XBTF, it had no problem and defaulted to a 16-bit 640x480 resolution which I was then able to change through the options to a more reasonable 32-bit 1920x1440. XT won't launch to let me do that, though.

Good tip about the event viewer although I'm not sure it gets us much further. An error gets logged each time XT fails to run and there are some lines that look like this:

Faulting application name: X-TENSION.exe, version: 2.2.6.7, time stamp: 0x4c49e8fa
Faulting module name: D3DIM.DLL, version: 10.0.19041.1, time stamp: 0x71e90702
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00017f68

So that would suggest Direct3D is involved, which figures since the crash happens at the point where the game seems to try and initialise graphics.

I tried finding an older version of the DLL on the net and put that in the game folder as an experiment. Sure enough, the game did try to use it, but crashes just the same.

Afraid not. I've used Galaxy to verify / repair the install and an installscript.vdf hasn't ever been in the install folder. Huzzah, bingo! Thanks so much for finding that post! My native desktop resolution is 2560x1440 and temporarily dropping it down to 1920x1080 did the trick. The game now launches and I can fix up the graphics settings from there. That's a fair warning. I did know the risk and no harm seemed to be done from that single test, but I deleted the DLL after it didn't help in fixing things.

Thank you for taking the time to help debug this! Now with the game at least launching, I wonder if I dare risk seeing how well it handles a HOTAS... :p

Note: as far as I remember, if you only install XTension, you cannot play the main XBTF story HOTAS work pretty well even on latest Windows... basic stick and throttle axis are usually supported out of the box, and while the in-game remapping options are a bit limited, you can manage the full range of buttons with your stick profiler software, or 3rd party utils; even voice control applications work fine with it

Glad of having helped you. Enjoy your game.

Hrm, okay then. Then I guess that's where I should be starting for now. Thanks for the tip!