When I tested Crimson Skies initially, I used a relatively up to date PC for the year (2005), but it was a dual-boot setup, and had Windows98se available, so that's where I tested. It worked just fine for me, and seemed like a potential high-attractant game to offer to my grandkid. He was getting some upgrades at the time, from an older Thunderbird Athlon CPU and KT133 board, to an Epox NF2 board with an XP 2600 processor.

That one only had Windows98se, period. But Crismson skies refused to run with that PC and Dx9; it whined about Dx7 not being installed, but couldn't do anything when told to go ahead and install Dx7. I never fixed it.

A couple of years later, I ran across mention of a fix for this bug, although I can't recall what it was.

the reason it didnt work
The reason for the corruption is because the game doesn't check correctly for the support of Nonpower of two textures. The Forceware driver now have an unlimited support for Nonpow2 textures. That means we don't export the caps NONPOW2CONDITIONAL anymore. However the game misinterprets this as we don't support Pow2 and/or nonpow2 textures."" whitch results in garbled textures