Boat Race Appearing ‘Glitchy’ or With a Black Background

Boat Race can occasionally appear ‘glitchy’ when opened on some systems. In some cases, pausing the session and then pressing play can cause the game to appear correctly, but this is not consistent.

This issue is caused when Boat Race encounters problems rendering the game’s graphics. There are a variety of reasons this may happen, but it seems to happen most often on newer computers. Boat Race is a game developed by a third-party developer many years ago, so was designed to work with older computers. As the developer no longer makes neurofeedback games, there is no permanent solution for this issue.

In some cases the issue can be resolved by adjusting how the game is rendered on the computer. To adjust Boat Race’s graphics settings, follow the instructions below:

1. Open the Windows File Explorer by navigating to it in the Start Menu or Windows Taskbar. Pressing Win+E on the keyboard will also open the Windows File Explorer.
2. On the left side of the File Explorer, navigate to the computer’s C: drive (may appear under This PC.)
3. Locate the Wayforward folder, then open the BoatRace subfolder (C:\Wayforward\BoatRace).
4. Open the Configurator.exe program in the BoatRace folder. A new window will open with a variety of options.
5. Locate the section for Renderer on the right side of the window. By default, this should be set to Direct3D 9. Change this setting to OpenGL.
6. Click Save and Quit in the bottom right to apply the settings.
7. Open EEGer and run a game with Boat Race - observe if the game displays properly after multiple sessions.
8. If issues persist, close EEGer and Boat Race. Repeat Steps 1-6 and select a different Renderer option from the program. On the Graphics tab, the quality of graphics can also be decreased to improve the game’s performance.