[DinkumThinkum]

A couple of graphic fixes I came up with while getting W&W running on my system. I'll post them here in case somebody else finds them useful.

My setup: WinXP Home, SP2, all the latest updates. ATI 9700Pro video board with fairly recent ATI drivers.

1. With W&W graphics options set to 'Software', I had intermittent blanking on some of the menu screens and the character inventory displays. Switching to Direct3D (in the W&W options) replaced the black outs with intermittent flickering, which is easier to live with than a blank screen.

When I get a flickering or blacked-out screen, it clears up when I click on the Close button or Go Back button; the display updates and goes back to normal.

(If the screen is completely blacked out, try guessing where the Go Back or Close button is, then click around that area until you hit it.)

2. The intermittent flickering in Direct3D mode was an improvement, but initially it was pretty awful to look at.

I went into my Windows Control Panel display driver settings and set Vertical Synch to 'Always on'. Now the flickering doesn't happen nearly as often, and it's just a very minor annoyance when it does show up.

And I can get rid of the flickering by just clicking the Close button for whatever I'm looking at; sometimes selecting a different character by clicking their portrait will also get rid of it.

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On my system, the Vertical Synch setting is here:

'Windows Control Panel | Display | Settings | Advanced | 3D | Custom'

It should be somewhere in the Advanced settings for most other video drivers too.

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Turning on Vertical Synch tells the graphics card to sychronize display updates with the monitor's refresh rate, so the game doesn't try changing the data while the monitor is painting it on the screen.

This can help make the display more stable, reduce tearing, etc., but it can also reduce frame rates (FPS) for high speeed action games. For slower paced games like W&W that don't need really high FPS, this doesn't matter.