Black screen in game

[jgf]

First, these are  two simple arcade game s have played for years on this system, through Vista and Win7, and were playing normally as recently as a month ago..

Second, no material changes to the system in months.  (Win 7, so no automatic updates;  periodic security updates manually via the Simplix mod.)

 

Starting either game now gets the background music and a black screen with normal windows cursor.  Task Manager shows game is running.  Must kill in Task Manager to exit;  one game just shuts down without a word, the other leaves this cryptic error message:

 

ERROR in
action number 1
of Begin Step Event
for object obj_controller_screen_transition_out_2:

Trying to use non-existing surface.

 

Researching this gets numerous links to highly technical discussions on developer sites, or unanswered questions on Steam site.

 

 

[jgf]

Addendum - FS Repaint is not working.  It starts, I can select an aircraft and a livery, the progress bar says it is loading, but the render window remains blank white.  Reinstalling didn't help.  It has been a couple of years since I last used this but can't help but wonder if it is related to the above issue.