AOE 1 & 2 and Starcraft graphics not displaying properly

I recently purchased a Gateway Core 2 Quad w/3Gb memory, Vista Home Premium
(32bit), & a NVidia 8500 GT card.

I am happy with all of this (obviously - I upgraded from a Pentium 2 w/Win
98!), so I'm totally new to the Vista O/S.

My games from the old computer ran perfect (albeit slow!) - AOM runs great
on this box, and all the graphics on AOE 1 & 2 are fine.... except when I
get into the (main) playing screen itself. The ground and water graphics
appear to be in low res mode (kind of like a 400x600x16bit color at best)
making the water & ground blotchy with colors - to the point that the fish
are almost invisible! The characters, buildings, movement, and Advanced
Command area at the bottom of the screen are all normal colors and
resolution.

As for Starcraft 1 (& Brood War) - same problem with water, but not ground!
Also the opening/closing screens for each scenario & Main entry screen (the
background) comes out a very strange color - almost like it is in inverse
color, but not absolute inverse (black becomes a blue-gray).

Warcraft 2 doesn't even want to run now after I used the conversion to both
Win98 & XP!

Help!

The problem is the vidoe card, Gateway should be ashamed to put that cadr
in ANY system, it is the cheapest DX10 card they can find.
IF you want to play games on that system you need to get a 7800 series(not
dx10capable) but ALOT faster than that 8500, or go to a
8800gt (about $260) the 8500 is about $80 retail at Newegg

"Chuck Knuth" <cknuth@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:11B911E5-0094-4B6D-8E7F-81E8F33BDD00@xxxxxx