[Steam/Win7]Black Screen on Startup

Gratuitous Forum Support
1

Hello,

I bought the Complete Pack off of Steam(which includes all the bonus races and such), and whenever I start the game, it never goes off the black screen, while the game is still running(I can hear the menu music). The demo worked just fine, so I’m wondering if it’s a problem with steam or something else, cause when I launch the game from within the directory, the same thing happens.

Here are my specs:

Pentium 4 2.40GHz
2GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 6200(552MB)
DirectX 11
1024x768 Monitor

When I checked the Steam Page, the minimum specs were way lower than that:

OS: Windows XP or Vista
Processor: 1.5 GHz processor
Memory: 1GB
Graphics: 3D Card with 128MB video memory
DirectX®: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 300 MB
Sound: Any

Thanks in advance for help.

2

Your system specs are almost exactly the same as mine. So the full game should work.
While I don’t know what might be causing the problem, i do have a few suggestions that may help.

One option we could try is to get the game to run in windowed mode. How do do all this:
Navigate to \My Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles
Open a file called Prefs.ini <-(If this file does not exist, then open notepad and save the file in the aforementioned location)
Edit your file to look like this:

[prefs]
width = 1024
height = 768
windowed = 1
sound_channels = 512

Save and close the file, then run GSB again.

Second Option:
Head to My Documents\Games\GratuitousSpacebattles
Rename the \GratuitousSpacebattles\ directory to something like \GratuitousSpacebattlesbroken\

Then run GSB.

GSB will rebuild the \GratuitousSpacebattles\ directory with default settings. See if that gets the game working.
If so then its a matter of moving your saved ship designs / unlocks / etc back.

If either of those fails to work, some random ideas that might work.

  • Get Steam to Verify the Download.
  • Make sure you have the latest drivers.
3

The first option worked; I can do everything without a hiccup, but there’s a tiny sliver of screen cut off, but it’s where all the buttons are and I can’t read them(though I can click them). Is there a fix for that, or do I have to live with it?

4

Ok, so we now know the system can handle the game in a windowed mode.

I would now suggest that you look at some of the other suggestions to see if you can get full screen.

  • Update / reinstall latest drivers. (I have lost count how many times this has worked)
  • Steam reverify download. (this has worked for a few other people that have had the black screen issue)

Left field ideas:
Change your desktop res to something slightly higher than 1024x768 and run GSB again.

5

if you have a game on steam that’s acting more often than not verify cache will fix it

but there can be other stuff