Games Don't display correctly after being minimized

Hi, i was playing a game (The Sims) and i minimized it to check if my downloads were complete but after i clicked on the game to play again it didnt display correctly. the text was fuzzy and all the item boxes were just blue squares. The windows that pop up in the game did not display at all but still made the sounds.

It happens in all my games, most of the time the text dissapears completely and i cant continue the game. This never happened in windows 7, why is this happening?

Thanks

Check your Video Card Drivers.
They may need to be updated.

Drivers | GeForce

This is normal behavior if you ask me. But still... it didn't happened in Win7 you say.

Try the new drivers trick. If there's still no fix look below: it's a matter of resolution switch and refresh.

Seems the game doesn't like a resolution switch too often.
Does the problem disappears after pausing/resuming the game?
Go to game options and reapply or change resolution and it will probably look good again.

What's your resolution on the desktop?
and
What's your resolution in the game?

-if both are the same then you will get best results from minimizing/maximizing the game and no fuzzy items should appear.
Try to use this if you switch frequently between desktop and game. But it's not always applicable (depends on game and graphic card if they both support it). There is also "windowed mode" but not all games have this option/parameter.

It's just an idea.

that's true, not all games are capable of minimizing and opening back up properly. Skyrim will let me do it a few times in Win7 and then it crashes if I keep doing it. Other games won't do it at all.
I have not played many games in Win8, no time lately. However, I did play Dishonored this past week and finished without a single crash in Win8. That game has a great story, and very decent game play. I was/am impressed.

The resolution of the games is the same as my desktop but one is different, the sims is 1024 x 768, it will not support a higher one because the game was made for windows 98. all my other games have the same as desktop. I could minimize and open games as many times as i want with windows 7 and no crash. My drivers are at their latest.

Spoonhead98 said:

the game was made for windows 98.

Click to expand...

That pretty much explains why you have issues.

Like I said: it's normal.

The best bet is trying Win98 compartibility for it if you're sure about this.
Does it also need 16bit color mode? Then enable that too.

That's recommended for older games.
This way you'll skip some auto detection that Windows will perform when running the game.

ok thanks but i thought any program that runs in Windows 7 will run in Windows 8, thats what Microsoft claim.

Spoonhead98 said:

ok thanks but i thought any program that runs in Windows 7 will run in Windows 8, thats what Microsoft claim.

Click to expand...

But Yes it runs. Isn't it? That minimize-to-taskbar for fulldcreen games was not guaranteed to work so if you do that once in a while with fullscreen games is expected to see glitches.

If it didn't happened in Win7 is one thing, Win8 is not identically the same: 16bit resolutions were taken out of the GUI list and added to compatibility mode, so that treats older games a bit differently that Win7 (noticed by using compatibility mode in Win7 and 8 and there is a difference: Win8 compatibility mode is more serious and works better if you ask me).

Really? Compatibility modes never really worked for me in any version of Windows.

Spoonhead98 said:

Really? Compatibility modes never really worked for me in any version of Windows.

Click to expand...

Depends on program you run.

Before Win8:
Tricky most of the time. Honestly I didn't see much benefit either, looking at Vista and 7. You even need to run troubleshooter to see more compatibility options.

There was this old game called Motoracer, made for Win98 and it only runs in 16bit color.
On Vista and 7 you could barely see the main menu and then the game (looked ok though) ran like crap. I don't know the exact problem but Win Vista and 7 were switching automatically in 16bit fullscreen. But the game required manual switching. On the other hand, Win8 cannot do that because the 16bit color modes were removed from there and added to compatibility mode. The game runs smoothly again! The resolution switch happens automatically through compatibility mode.
The only glitch: we need ALT+ Enter to enter full-screen once.

One important thing: Motoracer is very old but performs a OS check (seen at options) so if compatibility mode says Win98 that game is pleased and says Win98 as well.
So we can take the advantage of the new compatibility mode if we know how and when to use it.

See below a simple example that you can test as well.
Let's take a proof example: CCleaner runs well on Vista, Win7 and 8.
It's a good example to test compatibility mode because it detects and displays what OS it's running on.

On Win7 and 8 runs normally:


Then we change compatibility to Vista just for testing purposes:


And here is what we see by running it again:

Notice it says Vista and we also get a "Vista-looking" thinner window border applied.

That's a proof that compatibility mode works. I think it works best with programs like CCleaner that try to detect what Os we're running. Older games (16bit color trick recommended) and even newer that don't bother detecting what Os we have, something supposed to run on ALL systems, might not run on all systems and even compatibility mode will have no effect. It depends what program you're using.

This way, I hope you understand some of the basics about compatibility mode that seem to work, and that I also agree that not all programs seem to benefit from this mode.

Cheers
Hopachi

The CCleaner Method works, i run it in compatibility mode for vista and it does show up. I have found another glitch using the minimizing trick, some of my games lag really bad (about 2fps) but if i minimize them and reopen them it stops lagging. All the text has dissapeared in the game, does anyone know what this might be?

Nothing abnormal to note, but you might look at the gpu temperature when you get lags ans see if you have an overheating problem or not.

Use GPU-Z or Speccy or whatever you like for this.

i had overheating issues with my old pc. i now have a new one with lots of power and a new gpu. It does not overheat.

Spoonhead98 said:

i had overheating issues with my old pc. i now have a new one with lots of power and a new gpu. It does not overheat.

Click to expand...

Just checking the possibilities.

Have you got directx9c installed? Older games (even newer) require it.

No, where can i get that?

Spoonhead98 said:

No, where can i get that?

Click to expand...

Download DirectX 9.0c (Jun 10) - FileHippo.com

There for example.

Thanks for the link but it did not make a difference to the games.

This is what the games look like after being minimized. I have to minimize them to make the fps good. If i didnt minimize them they will run at about 2fps.

Midtown Madness 1:


Midtown Madness 2:


The Sims 1:


These are just some of the games i tested.

Are those last ones on 32 bit color mode?

Because I also have serious issues after minimizing on 16bit color mode:
-if you run 16bit color mode in compatibility, Win8 will switch the resolution when you start the game for the first time.
-if then you minimize, the resolution gets back to 32 bit and if you maximize again, the resolution doesn't switch back: all is in very bad color in small screen and the game is not playable at all.

Here are not just some menu's wrong but the whole screen.

Scenario:
-game is Dune 2000, version 1.06
-compatibility mode: left normally to Win8, color mode is 16 bit (required)
-game runs excellent; minimizing ruins everything.

The same thing doesn't happen on Win7 but Win7 lacks some support in the game with one minor glitch:
-when some building gets destroyed, the screen needs to shake: this is an effect from the game that works on Win98, ME, rarely on some XP, doesn't work on Vista, not in 7 (only in VM's) and surprisingly it works again on Win8.

In general with 16bit color mode programs: this distorted color after minimize-maximize is a serious lag/issue and I hope MS will (at least try to) fix it.

try running compatibility mode to windows 95
:huh:try installing windows vista as second os because these games are very old
hmmm maybe old drivers will do it