I cannot believe this completely unsupported fan-made utility from 1997 is failing to work on modern windows
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@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.
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I KNOW PROGRAMMERS WHO USE FULL-COLOR GRAPHICS AND THEY'RE ALL COWARDS.
REAL GAMERS USE 256 COLORS AND THEY LIKE IT
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okay so this is how the options menu looks natively, right?
That misplaced metal thing in the bottom right is the controls/OK/Cancel controls.
Presumably that thing is even more misplaced when I run this with default DxWnd options, so I am completely without an OK button...EXCEPT this is my third attempt at a screenshot.
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the first time I tried, the "you took a screenshot!" popup triggered so fast that windows was already switching out of 640x480x256 to my desktop resolution when the screenshot happened. Meaning I got a nice screenshot of windows explorer.
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so I went back and took a full screenshot which was fine, EXCEPT I got this:
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now the OK button is gone!
if you compare the screenshots, every single GUI element just jumped to the right when I tabbed back in! -
WHY IS THIS GAME SO HARD TO SCREENSHOT
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the weird part (THE SINGULAR WEIRD PART? REALLY?) is that the game's palette corrupted when I took this screenshot, of dxwnd.
Why the fuck did it corrupt the palette? DirectX corrupts the palette sometimes when you change SCREEN RESOLUTION. It currently is running in a window, the screen resolution didn't do squat when I hit func-alt-printscreen.
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here's what it looks like in DxWnd! it's even stranger, because it's got no OK button in a completely different way: it's just not there!
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so I noticed when I screenshat it that this is very much not 640x480. It's getting DPI scaled. I wonder how much that's fucking it up? Probably at least a little! let's turn that off and see.
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DPI scaled 256 color games. That's a world that never existed and never should
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Setting DPI awareness in DxWnd fixed that up.
So that's definitely an easily fixable problem: we just need to add a manifest to the EXE.This also fixed the font rendering in the inventory panel format bit, it was rendering as blue before.
alt-func-printscreen still gets nothing but blueness and the palette corrupts.
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ok, clicking "High Detail" (which changes it to "Low Detail", which is... NOT HOW CHECKBOXES WORK) makes the game render without strobe-effect. Changing resolution doesn't do anything. very odd!
