Black screen on start up

[Bwoodciv]

Hi all,

I’ve just bought an old PC with XP Professional basically so I can play Civ 4. It’s a gaming PC from 2008 & I a lot more powerful than my old one. However, after I’ve installed Civ 4 and open it, it displays the original loading screen, then the screen goes black. If I ‘Control, alt, delete’ to go to task manager for a flicker of a second I can see the full Civ screen (each time I do this I see it), then it vanishes. On task manger it says it’s happily running, but if I go back into it the screen goes black again. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance (please help!)

Moderator Action: Moved to Tech Support Forum. Cheers - lymond

 

[lymond]

Could be a plethora of issues with a machine that old. Please list your system specs and where you got your game, e.g. steam.

First though is graphical issues, so check your graphics card and make sure the drivers are up to date if you can even find them.

Also, set bts exe to run game in Windows XP compatibility mode.

 

[Bwoodciv]

Thanks for the reply. My specs are attached. I basically only bought this machine today to play Civ 4 (thinking old XP machine = OK to play old Civ game)! The version of Civ 4 is the oldest, original one, not Warlords or BTS How are others playing the game in 2023?

 

[lymond]

Oh no different these days really ...new OSs ofc and Steam does things a little differently. So you are running off a disk I assume? I haven't used a disk in probably 12 years or so.

BTS is really what you want to play, so you might want to get the game off GOG or Steam when it is on sale. But for playing now just check your graphics card and drivers. Reinstall Directx 9 as well...get off of the Microsoft website.

is that portuguese?

 

[Bwoodciv]

It’s Spanish, that’s another thing, I can’t change the language despite many websites saying it’s possible. Thanks for your help, but I’m bad with computers and this is beyond me (especially when having to navigate it in Spanish). I have a question; if I just buy BTS on Steam will it just run on my Windows 10 machine? I thought no, but there is contradictory information out there.