Breathing New Life Into Old DirectDraw Games - hacker re-implements ddraw.dll in OpenGL
sol.gfxile.net/ddhack/Posted Sep 7, 2010, 1:24 PM UTC
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sol.gfxile.net
[deleted]
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You can kind of get it working under Cygwin, and winehq has a more detailed explanation of why it doesn't work (yet).
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This has been a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng time coming
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Also, fuck yeah, WC! I finished WC3 again a couple of weeks back. Can't wait to try this out on Diablo.
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i miss wing commander. best series. they need to get the joker and get back on this series! and rerelease the old ones.
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Fun story: Remember how when you would quit Wing Command I how it would say 'Thank you for playing Wing Commander.' when returning you to the DOS prompt?
One of the developers in a comment thread somewhere said that EMM386 would toss an error upon exit. It wasn't critical as the program would still terminate without any ill effects but for the life of them they couldn't figure out how to stop the non-fatal error from ocurring. So he hex edited the error message in EMM386.exe to say 'Thank you for playing Wing Commander' instead of displaying the error. :)
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This is actually my favorite bug workaround of all time.
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Is the graphics better? I wasn't able to find any screenshot comparison on that site... anyone?
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I would tend to doubt it, I would bet this is almost entirely for compatibility and some performance, but I too would like to some comparisons.
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How is this this different from what WINE does? I'm guessing that WINE just doesn't call for 2D accelerated graphics whenever it encounters a ddraw call?
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I love projects like this. I was working on drop in replacement for libX11 for cygwin back in the day that would use the windows API rather than an X server. A number of later projects made it pointless to work on though.
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This works on other games too. Heart of Darkness had horrible palette problems in Win7, but with ddhack it ran perfectly.
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If Wing Commander works, that must mean Privateer does too. That game was all kinds of awesome, way ahead of its time.
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God, if there were ever a series that needed a revival it's Wing Commander. Hell, that entire genre needs a revival. I played the shit out of every space "flight" simulator as a kid to teen and now there just aren't any.
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space sims are really lacking these days. try darkstar one. it's pretty good, but it only has one ship.
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there's a few open-source initiatives underway which are worth keeping an eye on. check out vega strike and its derivatives.
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X3 is good if you have nothing to do but play X3. I want something like that but with a plot.
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That was a fantastic game; and the standard against which I've judged every subsequently released space sim.
It's a superficial thing, but I found the visual differences in the cockpit view between various ship models to be an extremely compelling feature, and I wish more games did this. I felt so damned accomplished at having gone from that run-down stainless steel Winnebago that you could barely see out of to a sleek fighter with a completely transparent front with projected hud.
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I'm testing this on Age of Empires when i get home. It was getting annoying having to kill my explorer process everytime I wanted to play those games.
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I tried on AoE 2, and unfortunatly, it doesn't works, too bad... But good job, though, looks like it was a lot of work.
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Get "palette stealer suspender", launches AOEII just fine.
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I personnaly use the hd patch. Works fine and looks great!
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Shit, I was looking for a HD patch but didn't turn anything up.. Care to toss a link my way?
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How does it not?
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It displays a good old error message and refuses to launch the game... If you find a way, please tell me!
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What old error message?
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I'm not familiar with DirectDraw. What are some games that support it?
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Most 90s 2d games.
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Diablo... Starcraft... etc
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So will this make it to where I can play StarCraft on Windows 7 without graphical glitches?
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It also helps a ton if you have more than one monitor. Beforehand, the other monitor would look like complete ass because it would switch to 256 colors and a tiny ass resolution.
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[deleted]
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The registry key hack doesn't work on Windows 7 x64, or doesn't always, at any rate. Fullscreen ddraw apps cause 7 x64 to hard-lock in many configurations.
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I was expecting before and after shots :(
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I would assume the graphics haven't changed. It's just reimplementing an old graphics dll, and updating it to more modern standards. It still looks and behaves to the game as it usually would.
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Oh so modern systems would be able to play the games in a more supported environment, still playing games at such low resolutions is tough on a modern monitor.
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Well I'm not sure if you're saying it's tough on you, or tough on the monitor. If you're saying it's tough on the monitor, I wouldn't think it is at all. All the monitor does is scale the resolution by adding more pixels so that if fits it's native resolution.
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Yay Wing Commander. Chris lived here, round the corner from my parents house where I was brunged up. We used to play - football and water fights were always a good laugh. That, and picking on Erin.
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Scrolling on that page is trippy as balls.
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Gimme some of that weed please...
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Fuck! Scrolling that website made me feel sick!!
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Awesome, sounds like this will fix Worms: Armageddon so I don't have to kill explorer.exe.
Edit: Nope, just crashes :(
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WA runs quite nicely in Virtual Box (no luck with VMWare or Parallels).
It's strange having to run Windows in a VM under Windows, but at least you get to play the game I guess
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Well it runs fine natively for me (on Win7 64-bit). Only the colours are off, and even they're ok once you kill explorer.exe. It also crashes occasionally between games, but not during.
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Brilliant! Now if someone could just get on to enabling Dark Engine games on modern computers, me and my copy of Thief would be very happy.
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[deleted]
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doesn't this only re-implement it for the wing commander games? he's not actually reimplementing it to replace any game that uses ddraw.dll? it was still interesting though.
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From the top of the post
I haven't tested these myself, but other people have reported success with trying ddhack with the following:
- StarCraft 1 (slightly sluggish)
- Fallout
- Fallout 2
So it works for some others at least.
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I think I'm missing something here. I just played and completed Fallout 2 on regular Windows Vista a few months ago, no problems whatsoever.
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I think it's one of those YMMV things, I know I have massive colour related issues with Starcraft 1 on Win 7 but I don't have the same problem with, say, infinity engine games or yeah Fallout.
Yet I know lots of other people that have no issues wth Starcraft at all.
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I only get these color issues if I patch to latest. v1.15.2 works fine.
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Reports on testing? How sluggish is sc1?
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That link there did get broke good.
I think I agree with this
EDIT: You should type in all caps, I'd expect nothing less from a screaming skull with bad grammar
Thanks. I thought about doing so but it wasn't intended to be a novelty account and I'd prefer to contribute to reddit in ways that didn't grow stale
A mirror of the site anyone? (not a mirror picture please)