Graphics too dark

I have a TNT2 Ultra Pro graphics driver. I’m using the Det677 driver. I’ve tried most drivers for this.
Gunna try them all again but thought I’d ask for advice first.
A lot of games are too dark.
Games like Dark Reign, StarCraft, etc. Tribes can be tweaked to be acceptable as can some others. But mostly having the settings in Control panel so high as to make widows unreadable for brightness I get varied degrees of sucess and the game options are somewhat delinquent.
I’ve also got a GForce2 in the cupboard but it makes no difference. I’m gunna try it again with a variety of drivers.
Could it be that I have a too new version of DirectX? Because I had 8 and chose not to install it with the games.
I have a PII 466 with 384MG of RAM and the games are installed on a 2nd hard drive.