Windows 98SE, but I wouldn't recommend doing this on a modern pc

instead, find a p4 junker around and put that to good sacrifice. 😀

Damn... that's exactly what I was hoping not to hear 🙁

I already know the game works in a virtualized Win98 but since it's a japanese game the text is displayed incorrectly (even the text translated into English)

I know, i know; the answer is the win 98se IME japanese language pack jadeon.exe but... agh, it's all just so much hassle. I'd honestly rather try Linux and see if WINE works.

thank you for the reply, though.

Getting old games running in modern operating systems is the ENTIRE reason why VOGONS started. 😀

I've already tried DXGL and dgVoodoo without success (they stop the flickering but one produces a crash when you enter a dungeon and the other makes the dungeon wall textures disappear); windowing programs don't hook the game either (DXwin and d3dWindower)-- I'm starting to think it may have SOMETHING to do with video. Whenever I record footage of the game using BANDICAM or FRAPS the flickering in the recorded footage is machine-gun rapid-fire unlike when the game is running normally where the flickering is subtle and random but consistent (both ways render it unplayable anyway).

why would recording software make the game's flickering go into overdrive? I don't even have any video codecs installed whatsoever. And of course I already tried launching the game without ANY video recording software installed and it still did it's flicker stuff.

So weird. The whole thing is extra stressful because I'm supposed to finish translating the game and I don't feel like doing so because the game is frankly unplayable.

what i'm gonna try now is hex-editing the game executable and change all the references of the directdraw.dll to the one i've renamed that comes with wine d3d for windows. hope it works.

i solved the issue. installing a 64-bit OS makes the game run flawlessly (obviously with the compatibility flag ticked for 95/98)

i'm p. sure the problem lies there, there must be some weird, misc. difference between the two versions of win7 and it happens to affect this directdraw game when run under 32-bit.

what a relief to finally be able to not only translate it but play it satisfactorily.

Well i feel foolish. Turns out it wasn't as simple as switching over to a 64-bit version of Windows 7... the screen-flickering returned eventually so I logically determined it must have something to do with the usual suite of software I installed on my system after installing an OS; sure enough it turns out the flickering was caused by one of the multiple video recording and video compression software programs I use regularly. I use multiple, like AVI Compression, Bandicam, MPEG-1, etc. Uninstalling them ALL allows me to play flicker-free.

:\

Interesting, thanks for the continued troubleshooting. 😀