Black Dahlia - Mouse Pointer Trails in Windows 7
 

Hello all!

I'm trying to play Black Dahlia in Windows 7 with an NVIDIA graphics card. I've found the two patches floating around the web and managed to get the game to work...

... EXCEPT for the fact that the mouse pointer leaves trails all over the screen when I move it!!

This is driving me crazy, and also crashes the game after a little while. From reading other posts on different forums, I've figured that the problem might lie in hardware acceleration, which I can't turn off in Windows 7 with my graphics card. I downloaded a DirectX Control Panel and tried to turn off DirectDraw Acceleration through that, but nothing happens then either. I run the game in Windows NT 4 compatibility mode, and have ticked the boxes for inactivating visual themes and inactivating desk composition in the properties for the .exe file. I just don't know what more I can do at this point.

Soooo... Anyone has any ideas for how to solve this? Might there possibly be any patches floating around that I haven't found...? Staying hopeful! :)

take off the compatabilty mode off the exe file & the trails dissappear. I found you only need it install game

I only used the official v1.1 patch before I played it a while ago. Don't know what other patch you've found or what it does (a link would be nice), but here is what I had to do to be able to play the game.

Turn off every CPU core except one, either by using imagecfg to modify the bd.exe or by alt-tabbing out of the game and doing it manually. This is what I believe will solve your problem.

Another tip is to open bd.ini and lower the values called vres and hres (under options). Before doing that the game was unplayable for me since the image spins out of control only by looking at the mouse.

I also copied all 8 CD:s to a folder and pointed every drive line in bd.ini to that folder. Makes it play completely from the HD.

I never had to lower the graphics acceleration.

There is a really cool patch made by Basti from the German Adventure-Treff website:

http://blog.coaster.de/modules/news/...p?storyid=1158

Among other things it removes the scanlines from the videos

The game doesn't like alt-tabbing. It crashes then.

Basti's patch is great, but it doesn't solve the problem with the mouse trails.

If the mouse wouldn't stop moving after a while I could live with the trails - they aren't that much of an obstacle (I have seen worse in other games).
So I am experimenting a lot here, too but no satisfying solution so far...

Thanks for your replies! The German patch mentioned above was what I used as well.

I actually gave up on Win7 and managed to get the game working on Win98 in VirtualBox instead (after several days of sweat and tears and teeth-gnashing), which I'm super-happy about. Now that you've given me a few new suggestions though, I'll try those out in Win7.