screen goes black in Red Alert 2 after pressing Escape while in game

[bughunter2]

In Red Alert 2, when we press Escape (while playing), an in-game menu is shown. This can be used to briefly pause the game, for example. If we then go back to playing the game, the whole screen is black. We can still select units and hear sounds, but the screen is black.

If we just start a skirmish game, we can, initially, play the game just fine. But whenever we press Escape and then go back to the game, the screen goes black.

This only happens with the OpenGL renderers (opengl and openglcore).

The problem does NOT occur when using the direct3d9 and direct3d9on12 renderers.

The problem doesn't occur with the gdi renderer either, but then the game's battle field looks small (like only filling up the top-left quarter of the screen, even though the game's sidebar looks normal and has its usual size).

The game was set to fullscreen mode, and cnc-ddraw was set to fullscreen mode as well.

This seems to be a bug in cnc-ddraw.

I tried this both with the original Red Alert 2 but I also tried it with the Mental Omega mod. When using the Mental Omega mod, the problem was the same as when using the original Red Alert 2. However, when using Mental Omega, I discovered that the problem only occurs when we use a non-native resolution (the original Red Alert 2 game always uses a non-native resolution, hence it always occurred when using the original Red Alert 2 game together with cnc-ddraw).

I also tested an older version of cnc-ddraw, and I noticed that the problem occurred regardless of whether we used the 'opengl' or the 'direct3d9' renderer. Funny enough, the 'gdi' renderer worked fine with that older version of cnc-ddraw (even when we used a non-native resolution, there was no scaling problem).

Versions:

• cnc-ddraw 7.1
• Linux (Fedora 41)