I have an acer 4830TG-6808

i5-2450M

8GB

64-bit Win 7

The key is GeForce 540M. I've done everything everyone has said and finally after updating to 8.17.12.9610 this driver version the game worked. However once I quit the game, shut down my laptop and restarted it's back to the same ole nonsense of hearing the sound, seeing your mouse pointer but no visuals at all. very frustrating. Trinity works just fine on all settings.

Also I do hook up my laptop to different monitors depending on if at work or at home. Not that it matters too much as just on the laptop screen it really goes bonkers.

I posted this in another Thread:

Send your save game file in so that they can analyze it internally.

Dear guys, I dun think I solved it for everyone, but I think there is a Windows-related error with this. I had Diplomacy since like 2009, played it well, tried a ton of mods on it, gave them up, so basically a lot of changes and all went well.

Suddenly, one day it would just not enter. Reinstalled... nothing new. Forgot about Diplomacy around last year's December.

Bought Rebellion. Worked on campus laptop I have at University. Came back to me home town, installed it on me way-better-PC" . . . Guess what? Hell no, black screen bug affected it too. :/

Took on me usual weapon: regestry cleansers, used CCleaner, bought RegTweaker, fixed all errors they found, Virus/Rootkit scan, etc. (no defrag yet). Laptop felt as new. Done so at home, guess what, I got rid of dem bug.

Me opinion? It could be no game-related bug, which can be explained by why dem devs didn't find the source yet

I tried it and it worked ^.^

Cheers!

(Hopefully one will give me a link or sth related to some new Advent PvP builds as thanks and hope it will work fer ya)

I was getting black start up crashes and just re-verified my game files through steam and it said 1 file failed to verify and would be reacquired. After that the game started up fine. Don't know if this is the same black screen bug though seeing as its an easy fix and has not been mentioned yet.

The solid workaround solution so far seems to be disabling the Nvidia graphics chipset and running with Intel integrated only. Has anyone else tried updating to the new Nvidia beta driver and seeing if that resolved the issues?

i keep getting the black screen, i tried Navigate to C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting. Open rebellion.user.setting using Notepad.  Change VideoIsWindowed to TRUE. Save and try loading the game. and it worked. game loads and works fine now. hope this helps

I also have a alienware m14x, and running the exe directly doesnt work. No external monitors and both chipsets are enabled

I had this problem too.

Asus laptop with:

* NVidia GT555M

* Intel HD 3000 series integrated Graphics

First selecting to run on the NVidia GPU did not work. However, installing the NEW NVidia drivers did the trick to finally get rid of this bug! I now run driver version 296.10 and Rebellion on the NVidia GPU works like a charm, I hope this will help other people with this problem.

I downloaded them here: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Not sure if this is relevant at all, but I was getting this error after I disabled the password on my computer. This also stopped every other game from working though. Putting the password back on fixed this black screen error for me.

Again, I am not sure this could possibly be relevant at all.

I do get a blackscreen but not at startup. It only seems to happen when two large fleets start fighting.

No, there's something different going on with ATI users that we're not sure of (though most users are having the Nvidia bug). If you could send us your crash logs (if they're being generated) and dxdiag info, that would be great. 

I have this problem still as well.

Have not been able to play. I only have the Intel Integrated only, no other card. (Intel (HD) 3000)

So I guess it goes without saying that I do run through Intel Integrated. But still my problem persists.