I'm sorry to do necromancy here, but has anybody found a solution to this problem. I have this exact same problem. SS1 install will detect my sound cards and I hear the test music and Shodan speech about weak flesh, but when I try to start the game with VDMsound, I get the black screen. I've done all the things suggested in this thread, but I don't find any help, so if somebody can help me with this problmes, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I can play the game with dosbox but the game lasg quite a bit, even with dos/32 extension and therefore I'd like to play it with sounds with high resolutionsl. My comp specs are as follows.

MB: Asus A8N-Deluxe
CPU: 3200+ athon
Mem: 1GB
Vid: GeForce 6600GT Club 3D

I also get the black screen. I can't get it to run using Mok's hacked .exe even without sound and MCGA cutscenes instead of SVGA cutscenes. Neither with or without nolfb.com or dos4gw.exe. VDMSound (v2.0.4 + fixes, v2.1.0) does nothing.

Works in DOSBox but I get less than 1 fps. More like 0.3 fps.

P4C 3 GHz
P4P800 deluxe
GF4 Ti4200
WinXP Pro SP2 (Eng)

I've noticed that pretty much everyone getting the black screen problem has some kind of GeForce, but this is not scientifically verified heh.
I'm trying to track down a working DOS v6.22 (all copies I can find have disk3 duplicated as disk1) and try to run SS1 in VMWare... that seems to be my only option other than getting an old, functioning Pentium/K5/K6/whatever system.

1fps? uhhh....Have you bothered to try using dynamic core in DosBox and increasing the cycles?

For running the game under Windows without DosBox have you tried the VGAFix program witch patches VGA.sys?

Yeah, I've tried the dynamic core thing... best I could do was to get about 5 fps or something (~25000 cycles, more made it slower). Sure, a huge improvement, but still not really playable. Changing the cycles on the fly didn't seem to work. Maybe the game stole the key input.

I'll try the VGAFix thing, thanks.

YAY! That (VGAFix) + disabling basic VESA support in VDMSound (which slowed down things considerably) did it. Thanks a lot. Now I just have to come up with a good control scheme. Hehe, damn, I don't remember the controls to be this messed up; then again I haven't played the game for almost 12 years.
Again, thanks!

So VGAFIX fixed the video problem? If so then thanks for reporting back!