I cannot believe this completely unsupported fan-made utility from 1997 is failing to work on modern windows
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that could be neat to patch into the old game.
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I don't see anything useful in the GTA RE. (at least the one that's still on github. I think one got DMCA'd out of existence. I'll check it too)
There's some warezed copies of the renderware SDK on the internet archive, but they seem to be significantly newer or significantly older than the one this game uses.
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yeah the "RenderWare(R) v1.3 JMP Evaluation Release" is from 1994, so obviously it doesn't have Win95 support, which'd be needed for SoulTrap.
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might still be close enough for looking up structure definitions and such. the 2.0 that SoulTrap uses might be similar to 1.3 except ported to win95
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by [email protected]
hah, while looking for RenderWare stuff, I found a disc called the "Virtual Reality Homebrewer's Handbook" from 1996.
It's got BRender files on it! Small world.(for context, I helped get BRender open sourced)
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now I gotta go check out this disc just in case these brender files are useful.
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Nah, same BRender demos we've already got.
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The Renderware stuff is a renderware demonstration program that doesn't run (through winevdm) on win10.
I don't have a win95 VM locally... maybe it'lll work enough over RDP to see if it has any useful files -
Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by [email protected]
forgot to link it:
Virtual Reality Homebrewer's Handbook CD-ROM : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
From the readme.txt on the CD: This CD accompanies the book The Virtual Reality Homebrewer's Handbook, by Robin Hollands, and published by John...
Internet Archive (archive.org)
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@foone did you forget again
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@foone 40 years ago, I cracked EasyWriter for PC-DOS using DEBUG.COM by replacing one instruction with NOPs. The copy protection was of the classic "read a sector on the floppy that shouldn't exist" flavor (don't remember if it was tricksy formatting or a physical hole in the disk) but I just stepped through the initialization until I saw the INT 13 and I could see what it was doing.
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@beka_valentine yes
(actually my clipboard fucked up) -
@wollman awesome!
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@foone bless you foone you're a delight
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The demo app is a shooty game. Nope, not useful. The files are all .RWX, not the .RWB SoulTrap uses
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some pixels there may not be entirely accurate. I'm doing RDP into a win10 machine running a win95 VM running this RenderWare game. There's multiple layers of compression and inaccurate emulation going on, the screen seems to be melting at points
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right now I can't really do dynamic analysis of the game, I tried once: if you hit a breakpoint, it completely locks you out of your computer. you have to windows->tab and kill it from there, because it will fuck up your GUI so hard you can't even use task manager
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so I gotta hack it to Not Fucking Do That, but I haven't figured out how yet.
I could use something like DxWnd to play it casually, but I'm trying to debug it, here. I can't really debug it with dxwnd, without this causing even further problems. maybe. I should try, actually
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so running it in DxWnd, it does work with no settings tweaked, which is more than I can say when I run it natively (it crashes with a texture error there)
it has a somewhat nauseating effect (that I'll have to GIF) of the 3D graphics only appearing every other frame. That might be fine at 60fps (especially on a CRT), but this is very much NOT 60fps and I'm on a fast LCD
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the funniest part is that I can't test any different graphical settings... because the "OK" button is missing from the options menu.
