Black screen problem

I am sending this on behalf of a friend because his computer has become unusable due to this game.

He installed this game and the graphics settings were not allowing it to work so he went into the video options of the game to turn down the graphics. He turned down the gamma (brightness) and it turned the screen all black. Becasue of this he couldn't see anything so he rebooted the computer thinking it wouldn't save the change, but now the screen is always black, even in Windows so he can't see anything to change it back.

How can he fix this?

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The monitor itself has a button for options. If he presses it, does anything show up? Unplugging it, powering up the PC, shutting it down, and plugging the monitor back in may also work if it triggers a hard reset of the settings, not sure on this one.

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Sounds strange, because once a game/application is no longer active any "active" changes they might have made should be gone...... however here's something to try anyway.

Have him boot into "safe mode". Navigate to the device manager, remove/uninstall his "display adapter" (video card) and then reboot. His video card will be autodetected again on reboot. He should then download the latest video driver (if he hasn't already) and install.

This should remove any weird changes somehow made to his video card driver settings. (settings that could be generating "out-of-sync-range" on the monitor thus displaying nothing)

thanks,

the Monk

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Thank you both for your suggestions. I will be going over there tomorrow night and I'll give them a try.

As far as the settings on the monitor itself, he did tell me he tried messing with those, but they didn't help.

As I recall, he said that when the computer first boots up, he can see things going on on the monitor. It's not until it boots into Windows that the screen goes blank which tells me it's a Windows setting taht was changed rather than a hardware setting. If that is the case, it seems to me I need a resolution that I can get to before Windows gets fully booted. Is there a settings that I could change in an INI file or something while booted in DOS mode?

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If he can see the bootup and everything, then my first suggestion probably won't do anything (messing with the monitor options itself), but I'm not exactly sure how Windows interacts with the monitor.

I don't know if there's a config file somewhere in windows you can change, though, and I'm not sure if booting Windows in safe mode will help. It may, because safe mode is very barebones and it uses default settings for pretty much everything, so who knows. If it does display properly in safe mode, then Monk's suggestion is right on the money. Remove the Display Adapter and reboot, it should auto-detect the video card and reset everything back to defaults.

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That is strange. I had a problem some what like that. You didn't say if your friend uses XP or Vista. Anyway, the game played fine on my Vista until I downloaded bonus files from Stardock. After adding the bonus files I started the program and the screen went black and that was it. I had to push Ctl,Alt,Delete to get back to Windows. Even if I tried to start the game with the DVD the screen froze in black, although my mouse still moved. I ran a Fix Install on it provided on the DVD but that didn't help. I had to uninstall the game completely and reinstall it. It works fine now but I'm not about to load those bogus bonus files.

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Quoting the_Monk,

reply 2

Sounds strange, because once a game/application is no longer active any "active" changes they might have made should be gone...... however here's something to try anyway.

Have him boot into "safe mode". Navigate to the device manager, remove/uninstall his "display adapter" (video card) and then reboot. His video card will be autodetected again on reboot. He should then download the latest video driver (if he hasn't already) and install.

This should remove any weird changes somehow made to his video card driver settings. (settings that could be generating "out-of-sync-range" on the monitor thus displaying nothing)

thanks,

the Monk

Thanks again for this suggestion. This did the trick. I booted his computer in safe mode which allowed me to get to and remove the display adaptor. After I rebooted, everything came back and started working like a charm. As it turns out, his computer wasn't quite robust enough to play to the game anyway so he'll probably be returning it.

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You're welcome...

Sorry to hear your friend won't be enjoying SINS, it really is a gem in the "game-world". Everytime I think I've got it all figured out, I get hit with a new strategy and another way to die....hehe

the Monk

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another way to die

*quickly scrambles to hide his space based harpoon launcher*

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Temblor bomb?

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