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How I fixed the infamous Basilisk II Windows “Black Screen” bug in 2013

’ve been noticing a lot of fun stories lately about bugs in old software that suddenly showed up in newer Windows versions. For example, here’s an excellent writeup by Silent about a bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that laid dormant until Windows 11 24H2 came out.

MattKC also recently posted a cool video about the massive project of decompiling LEGO Island, which also solved the mystery of the “exit glitch” that happened in newer versions of Windows. This iterative testing and debug tracing process revealed that redraw_func() in BasiliskII/src/SDL/video_sdl.cpp was periodically called during both failures and successes, but the display was only ever found to be “dirty” and needing an update in video_refresh_window_vosf() when video worked correctly. I was apologizing in the PR for accidentally including a minor unrelated file naming case sensitivity fix, which is something I easily should have been able to separate into individual branches and PRs myself if needed, but I had no idea what I was doing.

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