Black/Blank Screen

So I've received a few reports from beta testers that they're able to launch my game, but all they get is a black screen. The game runs, music plays and they can actually click various buttons, but -none- of the graphics actually draw.

I'm using textures up to 1024x768, but even the smaller ones (such as for the cursor) are failing. One user reported the following setup:

Windows 2000 SP 4
1 GB RAM
3.2 GHz Intel processor
GeForce 6800 GT video card, might not have latest driver currently. I’ll go see if there’s a newer driver soon.

I understand that this isn't much to go on; I'll try to cob together a snippet of code if I can, but I don't really have access to these machines to test (and the full codebase is about 18.5K lines.) Default configuration is to run using DirectX, fullscreen 1024x768 (degrading gracefully to 800x600 and 640x480, if need be.) This happens in both fullscreen and windowed modes.

Does anybody recognize this behavior? Does anybody have recommendations on where I should be looking?

All textures should be power of 2 and square (i think blitz may adjust them (slower)) but i dont think thats your problem.

Things to check that i can think of:

1, does the monitor say no signal/red light, if so, (if its an LCD especially) it may not be able to support the refresh in that mode if in hi-res, where the graphics card can, so no crash/error is raised.

2,I had a problem like this in my jetscream game (B3d) and found out i had a problem with the file packer not being refreshed after each item load, weirdly only on some machines?!?.

1. The monitor is working just fine; this even happens in windowed mode, with everything else running fine. (managed to find a computer where this happens.)

2. File packer?

One thing that could cose potential problems are multi monitor setups (when they try to use the BM app on the second monitor that is not hardware accelerated and similar issues) or in case you used OpenGL (which I assume as you use Apple), they just could have a crap onboard GPU (there is a given tendency that people with 3Ghz CPU believe their system is great, even if an Intel is in which will NOT work with OpenGL and has the potential to have bad problems with DX7 as well if it has some of the drivers released Feb - June 06)

Flip()?

Hehe, just kidding! :)

Hmm, perhaps you should include a way for the user to manually select the resolution (at least for now, for testing) and see if it is happening at all resolutions? Perhaps it is only happening at 1 or 2 resolutions and there's an error somewhere in your graphic initialization or fallback code?

Sorry I can't be of more help.

Thanks, all. The system I've found is single monitor, but could be suffering from dodgy drivers (as could, frankly, the other systems.) Like I said, this happens in windowed mode as well as in fullscreen, which makes me doubt that it's a monitor-can't-handle-the-resolution issue, and users can manually override the auto-detect by editing the prefs file by hand.

After septuple-checking, I've determined that I am, in fact, calling Flip(). *grin*

I'm beginning to suspect that it could be a "OS has been upgraded, but drivers haven't" kind of situation (I vaguely remember something similar happening when I was trying to run WC3 for the first time.) Which sucks for me, since driver upgrades of this nature aren't always straightforward and often result in ID-10/t errors...