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Colour issues - Overkill & Wari

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First post, by avatar_58

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For some reason these two games don't show up in proper colours.

Overkill looks like it is stuck in CGA mode in the title screens and Wari shows up black and white. If I run both of them in windows xp without dosbox the colours show up fine (but the game will be too fast or w/o sound obviously)

Does anyone know why this is?

Reply 2 of 34, by avatar_58

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Ok, but at least overkill looks fine once you get into the game.

Wari on the other hand...its next to unplayable! 😢 It has a "/m" option to force VGA but it doesn't seem to help.

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Reply 4 of 34, by avatar_58

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Yeah, I don't get it because this is made by the same company who makes "Chinese Checkers", Imagisoft, and that game works perfectly. 🤐 The readme to the game states it requires VGA or it won't play at all.....so its not like its defaulting to a b&w display or anything.

I'm tweaked a few video settings and it doesn't seem to help...

Reply 5 of 34, by HunterZ

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You could try running one of the CVS builds that have advanced, experimental SVGA emulation added in to see if that has any effect. I'm told that it probably won't though 😒 You should add this to the broken games thread.

Reply 6 of 34, by vasyl

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This is a weird one. I just tried it with fully patched (ykhwong's) build. First I started it with ET4000 256 color driver and got exactly the same b/w picture. Well, the game is for Win3.x, so maybe that VGA refers to Windows driver... I switched to plain VGA -- same effect plus the desktop was completely messed up after exiting the game (mental note: there is some funny stuff going on in 16-color modes in DOSBox). Switched back to ET4000 256 color, tried the game again -- and it came in correct color! Now I have it consistently working in all Tseng driver modes and consistently broken in VGA mode. I am not even sure if it is a bug in DOSBox or in the game itself.

Reply 7 of 34, by avatar_58

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Thats the build I tried....unfortunately I found it to be a bug in the CVS only. 😒 I just tried dosbox 0.63 and it worked correctly.

This is why I would love for d-fend to add an option to run certain games with a different version of dosbox, maybe a dosbox location dialogue per game. 😐 Thats exacty what is needed for games like this.

Reply 8 of 34, by Qbix

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vasyl wrote:

This is a weird one. I just tried it with fully patched (ykhwong's) build. First I started it with ET4000 256 color driver and got exactly the same b/w picture. Well, the game is for Win3.x, so maybe that VGA refers to Windows driver... I switched to plain VGA -- same effect plus the desktop was completely messed up after exiting the game (mental note: there is some funny stuff going on in 16-color modes in DOSBox). Switched back to ET4000 256 color, tried the game again -- and it came in correct color! Now I have it consistently working in all Tseng driver modes and consistently broken in VGA mode. I am not even sure if it is a bug in DOSBox or in the game itself.

Maybe a wrongly initialized register ?

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 9 of 34, by vasyl

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Could be. I don't understand why it fixed itself after switching drivers.
Overkill also looks quite odd: the first two screens appear in wrong palette and then it gets correct without even changing video mode. I have some theories but I'll have to do some debugging first. My prime theory is that VGA attribute register flip-flop logic is still somehow wrong. Maybe there is some other way to reset flip-flop that we don't have implemented yet and those games (or one of them) execute.

Reply 12 of 34, by avatar_58

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vasyl wrote:

This is a weird one. I just tried it with fully patched (ykhwong's) build. First I started it with ET4000 256 color driver and got exactly the same b/w picture. Well, the game is for Win3.x, so maybe that VGA refers to Windows driver... I switched to plain VGA -- same effect plus the desktop was completely messed up after exiting the game (mental note: there is some funny stuff going on in 16-color modes in DOSBox). Switched back to ET4000 256 color, tried the game again -- and it came in correct color! Now I have it consistently working in all Tseng driver modes and consistently broken in VGA mode. I am not even sure if it is a bug in DOSBox or in the game itself.

By the way, I did try using the vesa drivers of said cards from the utilities on ykhwong's website and they didn't help. It has to played from Windows 3.11 you say? Thats really odd because the game is supposed to be dos (although it does say it works in windows)

Reply 13 of 34, by vasyl

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I've got Wari from Imagisoft site http://www.imagisoft.com/games.htm and it came in Windows-based SFX and with Windows installer. Didn't try to run it in DOS after installing from Windows yet.

Reply 14 of 34, by avatar_58

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vasyl wrote:

I've got Wari from Imagisoft site http://www.imagisoft.com/games.htm and it came in Windows-based SFX and with Windows installer. Didn't try to run it in DOS after installing from Windows yet.

I just tried that but it asked me for a password. I enetered "Africa" and it extracted the readme but complained it was the wrong password for every other file 😅 Whats up with that?

Reply 17 of 34, by vasyl

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A little more info about Wari (BTW, it is DOS game, the distribution is just weird). It does work in 0.63 and it works with current CVS + SVGA patch, most likely works in plain CVS as well. It is broken in fully patched ykhwong's build only and even there it can be made working by creatively starting it from Win3. I have no idea which patch breaks it. What exactly is "VGA clear"?
Overkill suffers from different bug. It is possible that it was always that way, the game is quite playable. Without knowing how it should look I could miss the glitch easily.
Win3 VGA driver dies when exiting Wari under Win3 but that may be just the driver itself. SVGA driver survives just fine.