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Dark Omen Windows 8

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First post, by Khorney

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Hey guys, I've loaded up win8 on an old laptop of mine. Really nice speed upgrade, but unfortunately having some compatibility issues, particularly with win95/98 games (ra2/midtown madness2 spring to mind). Today's query focuses mainly on Dark Omen though.

I'll start by saying I've already tried all the traditional fixes for win7/vista. the bug is slightly different from normal for those in the know. the issue is a constant flickering on the screen, between normal/working and half resized. This screen demonstrates the bugged frames that flicker in:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/55188626/Untitled.png

In terms of solutions I've mainly been focusing on directX, specifically ddraw.dll. Dark Omen uses Dx5, so was probably the most obvious cause of faults. I've tried a few things, wined3d causes a straight up crash on start, DxGL causes an error saying my DX is out of date.

My current solution I'm working on is trying to fake a win98 environment through application virtualisation (eg. thinapp), but unfortunately the VM's I'm using to create a setup to extract arn't playing ball with my underpowered machine.

Any ideas? Might be a useful to come up with some solutions for the new operating system

Reply 4 of 8, by Khorney

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not an option. 2007 does not install in win8 under any circumstances. the updated alternative is hyper-v which comes with win8, but requires a i3/5/7 processor minimum.

I am using virtualbox currently to assist in creating a virtualised application for it as i said in my first post, but it is unplayable slow so only good for that.

as I said i tried all the win7/vista fixes.

seems like a more technical solution is required which I am investigating

Reply 6 of 8, by aqrit

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I took a look at this today:

The secret to getting Dark Omen running on Win8 seems to be "Windows XP Compatibility mode"

for some reason, I have trouble with flicking / black background... maybe because I skipped installing DirectX 5 and/or crash fix?

Dark Omen uses Direct3D retained mode but it outputs using DirectDraw...
It is pretty obvious that every-other frame is screwed up... so I tried Blt'ing the back buffer to the front instead of Flipping ... this fixes the issue with Win7 - 3D mode 😁

The hack did do something in win8 but it still wasn't correct. Win8 applies some kind of application compatibility shim to EngRel.exe that causes it to take forever to launch AND screws up the graphics...

so I had to have my hacked ddraw.dll and rename EngRel.exe to something else to get the game playing correctly in CPU mode in Win8. ( still doesn't work in 3D mode )

I'll try to have a patcher put together sometime in this next week 😎

Reply 7 of 8, by Bladeforce

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Sorry about this but I would never upgrade to Window 8. I already have a vast majority of my old games working and putting Window 8 on it would just be negative move

Reply 8 of 8, by aqrit

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The easiest fix is a 1 byte patch to enable windowed mode.
Details: http://forum.dark-omen.org/index.php/topic,11 … 4.msg12011.html

I haven't decided if I want to spend more time to get it *right*.

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