Quake II Fix Guide - Getting a Black Screen with Yamagi?

When you launch Quake II with the Yamagi Patch installed, are you getting a solid black screen with Quake II's audio still running normally? This guide explains what the problem is, and the solution to fix it.

DISCLAIMER: This may be a bit different for Macs, I cannot say for certain. I do not know Macs very well and I do not own a Mac myself, however I will try and help you the best I can.

My Own Experience

Normally Yamagi should work straight away after installing it, and Quake II should start up just fine when launched. I've installed the Yamagi patch before on a fairly new Windows 10 laptop PC and never had an issue, however I recently I installed Yamagi on an older Windows 7 desktop PC and got the black screen problem. I eventually pinpointed the problem and figured out the solution.

Quake II and Yamagi's Rendering Modes

Quake II came with two rendering modes back in 1997; Software Mode and OpenGL (Version 1.4). Software Mode was included if your computer could not run Quake II in OpenGL, while OpenGL is the more advanced of the two rendering modes. Having a Software and OpenGL rendering mode was common for a lot of early 3D computer games in the 90's.

OpenGL can render better lighting and particles than Software Mode can, and it can handle a smoother frame rate. To run Quake II in OpenGL back in the 90's your computer needed to have the appropriate hardware. Nowadays any computer with newer hardware is capable of running Quake II's OpenGL rendering mode with no problems.

Yamagi introduces a new third rendering mode called OpenGL Version 3.2. This is set up to launch by default when you install the Yamagi Patch. This is most likely the reason why you are getting a black screen with Yamagi. Some computers are fine with it while others are not. If Quake II ran normally prior to installing the Yamagi Patch and you are now experiencing the black screen problem, then it's even more certain that OpenGL 3.2 is the culprit.

What You Need To Do

When you install Yamagi, it creates a folder in 'My Documents' called 'YamagiQ2'. Navigate to Documents\YamagiQ2\baseq2 . Once in the baseq2 folder, open the auto executable file (autoexec.cfg). If there is no auto executable, create one by making a new text file and renaming it from 'New Text Document.txt' to 'autoexec.cfg'. Make sure you've replaced the '.txt' file extentsion to '.cfg' or else this will not work correctly.

Enter the following line in your auto executable:

vid_renderer "gl1"

This line changes your rendering mode from Yamagi's OpenGL Version 3.2, back to Quake II's original OpenGL Version 1.4. The value for OpenGL 1.4 is "gl1", the value for OpenGL 3.2 is "gl3". Don't worry about changing over to OpenGL 1.4, Yamagi's new keybindings and soundtrack fix will still work.

Test Quake II

Boot up Quake II again and everything should be working as it should.

If it still isn't working, read over this guide again and double-check that you did everything correctly to be sure that you did not make an error. If you have absolutely done everything correctly, shoot me a message in the comments section below and I'll respond to you as soon as I can. If I made any mistakes, let me know and I will revise this guide accordingly.