EDIT: TH300 suggested a solution that fixed the stuck main menu problem for me. If you're having the same problem in Windows 8, go to your Outpost2.ini file and edit the line SpiffyDraw=1 to read SpiffyDraw=0 and you're all set.
Hello gentlemen.
I recently had to replace a laptop that experienced a hardware failure. Of course, most new laptops come with Windows 8 now, so I had an opportunity to experiment with it before I consider nuking it from orbit and putting Windows 7 on it. Since Windows 8 is basically Windows 7 with the Metro interface corner stapled onto it, I can happily report that most of my older games that run on W7 seem fine there. Maybe a relief for those of you out there who might not have much choice in their operating system and could end up stuck with it.
Anyway, Outpost 2 seems to be acting up a bit on Windows 8. I only tinkered with it for a little while, but thought I'd relate my findings here in case someone else wanted to look into it. It might be an easy fix that I overlooked, or it could be something that might require another Opu update.
The game starts up fine at first, music and main menu all good, but clicking to open any of the other menus seems more often than not to totally freeze the game up in the middle of it trying to draw the next menu; most of the background will be showing, and maybe just the very top of the next menu box has been drawn.
I tried five times, it hung up this way on four of the attempts and had to be terminated through task manager, but one time it got through far enough I was able to load the Eden Unit Reference tutorial level, and the game seemed fine otherwise. I also tried Windows 98 compatibility mode, but the behavior persisted. I was going to try 'Disable visual themes' next, but that option isn't present in the W8 compatibility tab.
Anyhow, not a big deal for me as I have other computers to play it on, but I thought I'd toss this out here in case someone might have access to W8 and like to look into it before some poor soul stuck with Windows 8 might want to play it and is stuck dealing with that problem. I may come back to it and try a few other things and report back with the results, but it doesn't look like there's a lot of compatibility levers I can tug on in W8.