Summary

I found a most mysterious (and thus far, undocumented) way to get Master of Orion II to run *perfectly* under Windows 2000 Professional. Best of all, it's simple.

After reading through dozens of posts on various 'boards online, I saw that over and over again, people were talking about mouse hangups and screen corruption. I was able to replicate all of these problems by turning my video acceleration settings down:

Display Properties/Settings tab/Advanced button/Troubleshooting tab

Obviously, this wasn't a very good solution- in my case, running win2k Pro with Directx9.0b, I was losing control of the mouse (but *not* the keyboard) when I passed beyond the initial game menu screen.

So, convinced that the problem had to be a DirectX issue, I opened DXDIAG.EXE (just open up Start button/Run/ and type "dxdiag").

Then I went to the Display tab and *disabled* all DirectDraw acceleration. Yes, that turns off everything, including Direct3D, so you'll have to set this back to "enable" if you want to play more modern games.

Turning it off worked absolutely perfectly- MOOII runs flawlessly, other than the few well-documented bugs in the the Win95 executable.

I've tested this solution on two machines, with the same results, but I have yet to try it with XP Pro, so testing needs to be performed by somebody in the community. Please pass the word on this solution for game-lovers everywhere... MOOII is a much-loved game, and I'm glad I found a better solution than what I'd documented online :-)