MrTarot

Thanks to both of you, as it turns out it was the fact that I didn't have the correct driver installed for my monitor. As soon as this was installed, I could start up the CMAK Demo and it ran without a problem. I must say I am impressed with the visual changes and I can't believe how great everything looks. Thanks to both of you for your help in getting this solved. Just for the record I did end up using the beta 56.55 drivers and making sure that the monitor was installed properly to fix the problem. It even runs with the Antialiasing and Anistropic set for application controlled. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am about getting to try out the demo's and potentially buying the full blown versions of CMBB and CMAK.

First, thanks for your response, I really appreciate it. Now, let's get to the questions and my answers for you: My monitor is listed as default monitor (which until you asked, I never really looked). I'm running DirectX 9.0b and as far as I know I'm patched to the gills. I know that the patch you asked about is installed, but when I tried to remove it, it did not give me a remove option. I imagine that's not a good thing. It's pretty obvious from the screenshots that the engine has undergone some changes. Perhaps I just need to be more patient and wait for the 56.x drivers to stablize (but oh the agony of waiting hehe). I'm going to research the possibility of a better patch for that Q328310 problem. Once again, I appreciate your time and any thoughts you have would be appreciated.

Ok, before I just give up and go back to 30.82 (?) or whatever it is that is supposed to be free of whatever causes the black screen of frustration, I would like some feedback on whether I missed a step or what for installing a new nVidia driver. But first, the formalities: AMD 2100+ AthlonXP, nVidia GeForce 4200 Ti AGP 8x 512MB DDR RAM WindowsXP Pro The steps I used were: 1) Use control panel to uninstall the driver 2) Boot into safe mode and don't let windows pick a driver for the video card. 3) Run Driver Cleaner (2.7) to kill all the nVidia stuff. 4) Boot back into XP and install the experimental 56.55 drivers. 5) Start up CMAK Demo and get same black screen. 6) Check settings for Antialiasing & Anistropic 50 times to make sure they are off. 7) Try demo again, get black screen of frustration. 8) Come to forum to beg for help. As a side note, CMBO works every time. I wanted to make sure that the demo would run before purchasing the retail, but now I'm really leary about it. So my question is, am I missing a step in the nVidia driver shuffle? Should I just go back to 30.82? Do I sound desperate enough? And I thought I hated the BSOD...