Breathing new life into old DirectDraw games.
iki.fi/sol/ddhack/Posted Sep 6, 2010, 7:29 PM UTC
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iki.fi
Kick ass! I just tried this on Heart of Darkness, which previously had a messed up palette in Win7, and it worked perfectly without any tweaking. This guy is a legend.
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Very good, although from the introduction text i assumed he reimplemented the whole DirectDraw interface in OpenGL :-P
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i didnt get what it's actually doing. everything is still rendered by ddraw, but put on the screen with opengl? he kept talking about how all the others are just wrappers that let the real ddraw do all the work, which is odd if his does the same. oO
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He has re-implemented a subset of direct draw, pretty much only the parts that those three games need. His DLL exposes the same interface as direct draw, but does the rendering in OpenGL.
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I absolutely loved the first Wing Commander, for its incredibly smooth gameplay and (at the time) awesome graphics. With an old Kraft analog joystick, this was the best action game ever.
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Cool, was trying to get X-wing from about 1995 and Rebel Assault from about 1998 to play on Win 7, will try it out on those 2.
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I would try DOSbox or VirtualPC. DOSbox works well and with a front end like D-Fend Reloaded is pretty easy to configure.
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I tried it with Masters of Orion 2 - no dice... It shows his logo at at the top left corner, but CPU usage sits on 100% (50% cause I'm on a dual core) and it does nothing after that :(
Back to killing explorer for me...
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This works with Brood War (just put it in the same folder) so it runs correctly under Windows 7. No more messed up colors!
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Would this make WWP work on W7/Vista?
If so, I'll go do a happydance.
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Windows Compatibility Toolkit isn't sufficient?
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Nope, it has never fully worked. On Vista, sometimes the palette was fine for a game, and the next it was all wrong. And on W7 it never worked.
I tried it now, the game starts and displays the DD-Hack logo, but then goes to a black screen :(
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this is cool, you should crosspost to r/games
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Someone did and its getting a lot more up votes then in r/programming. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dalpd/breathing_new_life_into_old_directdraw_games/
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Vmware and old version of Windows would have been much less trouble...
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Unfortunately that doesn't work as well as you'd think - granted, I've only tried with Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 and Age of Empires 1.
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Mostly because the likes of VMWare have the shittiest graphics subsystem known to man.
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Another great option for old games is Dosbox, but admittedly that doesn't cover Windows.
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Or probably Wine on a Unix system.
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[deleted]
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It's been tried! Wine on Windows with Cygwin, MinGW and Interix. None of them really work well enough to be useful, but the effort is apparently useful to the goal of shaking bugs out of Wine, MinGW and Cygwin.
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Worth a try, although Wine's support for the oldest versions of DirectX is somewhat worse than you'd hope for. Sounds like it might be the easiest way of getting WC4 running, though.
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Cool
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Story
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Bra
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Needs more of this.