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[AlienChickenPie]

I've recently returned to the game, and a new problem came up. Whenever I start, I get a blank window, black all over. This happens with several installations, including ones that worked on someone else's PC. I've tried to reinstall the drivers, but that didn't change much. In fact, the only way to get the game to display was to strip the video card driver and let Windows use whatever it wants, and the result was so sluggish that rendering a single frame while idling at the main menu became a gradual process that took the better part of a second.
There is a shred of hope, though. Whenever I exit the game normally by pressing up and return instead of terminating it, the window unblanks for a split second.

Any ideas?

[Footkerchief]

What version of DF are you using?  Did you try getting NEW video drivers from the manufacturer's website?  What operating system and graphics card?

[AlienChickenPie]

40d, both the old one and the current numbered version.
The computer is a laptop running Windows 7, the card is a GeForce 8400M. I've managed to run the game before, and run it quite well.
The drivers I tried were the latest one from Nvidia, an older one from Nvidia and whatever Windows used when I removed the existing drivers.
While we're at it, vsync didn't make a difference, and neither did switching between graphics and text, or full screen and windowed mode.

[Footkerchief]

Hmm.  Apparently you can get display issues when you have texture compression turned on in your graphics options -- try going into your NVIDIA configuration thing and messing with it.  That problem seems to usually produce mangled fonts, though, not a blank screen.

In regular 40d, try turning PARTIAL_PRINT off in init.  In 40d16, try messing with PRINT_MODE and SINGLE_BUFFER.  If none of that changes anything, see if you can run an older version like 38c.

[AlienChickenPie]

Setting SINGLE_BUFFER to NO did what a Windows reinstall couldn't, and fixed the problem.
I'll restate this for future forum searching generations:
Blank screen or black screen on DF startup was solved on my Geforce 8400M laptop by setting SINGLE_BUFFER to NO.