Hey Guys
Im new here. I like to consider myself failry well versed with Computers but my love of classic old strategy games is just too great despite all the XBox's and PS3's these days.

Any way Im hoping somebody can help before I tear my hair out.
I have a Vista 64 Home Premium
Dell XPS M1330
4GB RAM 2.2 GHz Core2 Duo T5900

With a NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS graphics card.
Im running on the latest DirectX 11

As of late 2011/ early 2012, I was forced to reinstall windows and all my old school games/software that I had on it

EVERYTHING installed without any problems EXCEPT for my favorite game
Some of you may know it: Gangsters 2 by Hothouse Creations/Eidos Interactive

The game is made ideally for Windows 98 or XP at the most but I overcame that by running it in compatibility mode for Windows 98/ME. It also had a NO CD inserted problem but a patch for that fixed that CD issue.

The problem:
During the system Check i get a warning stating I need 4MB of Memory
Installation resumes as normal.
I go to open the game and get the a message statting it will try to determine the best video mode and that I may see a garbled display for a little bit.

Then I get the following error

IT HAS NOT BEEN POSSIBLE TO DETERMINE THE OPTIMUM VIDEO MODE FOR YOUR SYSTEM. THIS HAS BEEN SET BY DEFAULT TO 0

immediatly after that I get



ERROR..SORRY. UNABLE TO START GAME. CANT ACCESS THE DIRECT DRAW DRIVER

The question:
What is this Direct Draw Driver
and Why is DirectDraw Acceleration UNAVAILABLE whenever I run a DXDIAG
Where can I download one or How can I make it available.

I tried to manually adjust the hardware acceleration slidebar in display settings--Advanced settings--troubleshooting but that was grayed out stating YOUR CURRENT DISPLAY DRIVER DOES NOT ALLOW CHANGES TO BE MADE TO HARDWARE ACCELERATION SETTINGS

All efforts "update" Direct X have resulted in a smug - Detection of most recent blah blah, no installation is required

Somebody please help me
Thanks and have an awesome day!!!

Thanks I didnt mean to fill up the boards but I wasnt sure which category to place it in! I just hope that this is the correct location for such an issue.

according to update checks, everything seems to be up to date!
I ran a little test and installed it on windows 7, graphics are a bit garbled (in game text a little thin) but everything works fine with zero errors, funny seeing as how the guys from Tech support from game producers told me it wont work on Windows 7!

Anyway- if anybody reading this has any ideas- please help!

Thanks for providing this
I have tried several of those options and none of them have worked.
For some reason, I cant even adjust the hardware acceleration settings on my own.
I wonder if a reinstallation of the graphics card AND/OR Direct X would do the trick
but thats way over my head im afraid and I dont want to cripple anything in my system by such an action!

I am not circumventing anything. I own the game disc fair and square. The Patch I mentioned in my very first post was one that was developed by the game developers themselves to fix a "CD NOT INSERTED" bug. That was an original bug and that patch was offered as a fix to the original bug. Again, I am not circumventing anything as I own an original copy of the disc. Thanks