Installiing SMAC (original) on Windows 7

[Buster's Uncle]

An oldie but a helpful-y from early 2012:

...

For graphics palette testing reasons, I dug up my 1997 release of vanilla SMAC this morning and installed it, unpatched. In case anyone happens along needing to do the same thing, and also in case Petek can help me get it running better, here is my report.

The first thing I did wrong is let the installer auto-run the game when it finished. I knew the autorun on the CD was crap - and sure enough, I had to [control][alt][delete] to close the game so I could troubleshoot.

I found where the AC folder had installed (C:\Program Files (x86)\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri on my machine) and made a desktop shortcut directly to terran.exe (you can't miss it; it's the one with a Planet icon). Long story short, it doesn't work without a compatability setting, (right-click to bring up the Properties pop-up) and this is the one that seems to work best:





Now, here's the odd part I have a faint hope I can get help with; the opening screen looks like this:



Pushing the right-hand box (obviously a button displaying wrong) always gets me a crash-to-desktop. Pushing the left one plays the Friaxis movie then the intro movie if the CD is on the drive, then the game starts - without the CD gets me this:



Hitting Continue gets me the normal:



-then movies play (I did a complete install) then the game starts. In either case, clicking anywhere skips the movies and the game starts.

Anyone know how to fix that black screen thing without patching? I should probably patch it, now that I've done my graphics testing...

...

Petek then replied:

If for some reason you don't want to patch the game, then try adding

 DirectDraw=0

 to the [Alpha Centauri] section of your ini file. However, since applying the latest unofficial patch will solve lots of other problems, you should apply that as well.

And I said:

The direct draw trick eliminated the extra CD check Windows pop-up, but not the black screen. I'm gonna try the patch...

Then:

scient did the trick.   

Hope this helps someone...

[Buster's Uncle]

Bumped fo' Uno.