First post, by jvieira
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello all. I have registered here to post this query, in hopes someone has ever found a solution. My problem relates to running XCOM Apoacalypse in XP with VDMSound (as opposed to running with DOSBOX. This problem is not related to VDMSound, just mentioning how I am working to play the game).
I have gotten the game to work flawlessly except for one problem, that being that the graphics palette apears corrupted. I found other people with the same problem on another forum, and here is a picture of what the main menu looks like with this problem:
http://imagegrotto.com/view-apocxc85311.jpg
For what it's worth, that poster had said he had a X1950 ATI card, and so do I. It appears that playing the game this way USED to work fine for many people, but recent, newer video cards and drivers have caused this problem to appear. The game appears to run and play completely normally apart from this. There is no graphic corruption itself, just the wrong color palette.
I want to point out first that I have spent a week or more already fully investigate, searching, and reading numerous forums and FAQS, and trying all the obvious things like forcing 640x480 @ 256 colors, etc. I have not found anything except the posts I mentioned at xcomufo.com, where someone else had the problem but never found a solution. As far as I can tell, this is a problem that has never been solved. Many people just play the game in DOSBOX, and I can't blame them if it works for them. But it simply does not work for me.
I spent a considerable amount of time configuring DOSBOX. It simply is not an option on my system. At best it's very slow and stuttery, and it locks up continuously. Like when going to the options screen and clicking "abandon and restart game", it will freeze up with the sound looping and cursor frozen. So playing with VDMSound in XP is a preferable solution to me.
I can't help but feel that this is an issue related simply to the palette. Either newer video cards store palette info in a different way, or location, or something along these lines.
One other note, when I do a ALT-P screenshot in the game, with these messed up colors, and then quit the game to look at the screenshots, they look NORMAL. I don't know if that helps to figure what the problem is. I found it odd. They come out looking normal even though it looks totally screwed up in the game.
I wonder if there are any technical minded people out there that would be willing to help try to determine what causes this and fix it. My limited programing knowledge leads me to believe it would just be a matter of forcing the correct color palette in some way. Like the SVGA patch that is out there for fixing video errors.. something that changes where the palette info is pointed to, or overwrites the palette with the proper one.
I can't help but think this is a problem that is going to continue into the future with other new cards running older games, and I'm sure that many people would be very grateful for any kind of fix. It seems to happen only on newer cards, as if they are not fully backwards compatiable somehow.
Please, if anyone can help, I would be eternally grateful.
