SMAC and Direct Draw

My laptop was having issues playing SMAC and SMACX, after hours of troubleshooting I finally found the issue, the game would not play without directdraw enabled for me, i used ddhack to make it run properly.
I'm wondering tho, what does the game use when directdraw is disabled? I'd like to Fix that so I can play without it because it causes issues with my system.

Welcome to CivFanatics and the Alpha Centauri forum!

Perhaps you already know this, but look in your Alpha Centauri.ini file. In the [Alpha Centauri] section of this file, the command DirectDraw=1 should enable DirectDraw and DirectDraw=0 should disable it. Disabling DirectDraw usually forces the game to run at your native Windows resolution.

However, let's go back to Troubleshooting 101 to see if we can fix your problem:

1. Are your versions of the game fully patched? From within the game, press Ctrl-F4. If all official patches are installed, SMAC should show Version 5.0 and SMAX should show version 2.0.

2. What is your laptop's native resolution? Some laptops have problems running the game if the native resolution is 1024x600 or some other such.

3. What version of Windows are you running?

4. Where did you get the games: GOG, or some other source?