On closer inspection after mucking around, it appears to be the HUD splattering itself all over the screen for a split-second every now and then. Happens when standing perfectly still or moving around.

Swapped out the GPU with a GeForce 2 MX200 - same problem. Put together a little AMD machine with a Duron 1300 and a Radeon R9600 XT on some old Asus motherboard. The problem does not exist on this particular machine. Also, on closer CLOSER inspection, it's not simply the HUD that bloops across the screen - whatever is displayed on-screen momentarily jumbles itself across the entire display. It's so brief that it's hard to catch, but it's there.

I kinda remember this is because of the VESA BIOS of these cards that enable linear framebuffer, if you disable this then the flicker will be gone

keropi wrote:

I kinda remember this is because of the VESA BIOS of these cards that enable linear framebuffer, if you disable this then the flicker will be gone

Hey, thanks for responding! I'm still reeeaaasonably new to using these older systems, and haven't really touched DOS since about... 1994. How would I go about doing that?

NOLFB turned out to be the solution. Never heard of it until yesterday, and from everything I read about it, it had no benefits for Windows 98/DOS builds and in fact might make performance worse. But thanks keropi, you prince, for mentioning linear framebuffer - a bunch of googling later and I decided to give NOLFB a try and voila: no more glitching.

Heh glad I could point you at the right direction 😀 enjoy the games they are awesome !