First post, by maltron66
Let me preface this by saying that I've used dgvoodoo (specifically the 2.8.2 version) on a number of other old games and it runs them perfectly.
However, I'm having trouble with one particular game from 2003, called "Off-Road Arena" (originally released in 2001 under the name "Larry Ragland's 4x4 Challenge"), which I downloaded from MyAbandonware. I'm using Windows 10 Pro 64-bit.
Without dgvoodoo, the game crashes on launch. With dgvoodoo, the game works, but when I get into a race, everytime I make a turn at high speeds, I get these black lines flickering in the middle of the screen. When I go straight, the lines disappear, but when I make another turn, the lines appear again. And although the game is still playable, these lines are extremely distracting (it looks much worse on video than it does on a couple of static screenshots). I have tried countless compatibility modes and configurations: from copying the dgVoodooCpl.exe file and all .dll files from the MS/86 folder to the game's main directory and trying to configure the game with the .exe, to copying only the .dll files, to trying different combinations of the .dll files, to using the .dll files found in the x64 and arm64x folders. Nothing works (and it some cases the game fatally crashes on launch).
I've seen 2 gameplay videos of this game on YouTube where the game runs flawlessly, with people asking how to get this game to work on Windows 10 and the uploaders saying they're using dgvoodoo, but they didn't answer my questions when I asked for help. Still, I now know for a fact that the game SHOULD work perfectly with dgvoodoo, but configuring it properly is beyond my abilities. If there's anyone who could solve this problem for me (or at least tell me which settings to experiment with), I would really appreciate it.
One thing I should also mention is that the game itself comes with its own display selector .exe file. It allows you to change between drivers (without dgvoodoo, you can select from the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter, the graphics card-which is an AMD Radeon RX6800 in my case-and software rendering, but if you copy over the dgvoodoo files, the Microsoft driver is replaced by the dgVoodoo DirectX Wrapper) and various resolutions, both in 16 bits and 32 bits. If I copy over the dgvoodoo files and select software rendering from the display selector, the glitch no longer occurs, but the graphics are much uglier. Changing between the dgVoodoo wrapper and the graphics card doesn't produce any noticeably different results. The game runs but the black lines occur.
So yeah, if anyone could give me a hand, I would be very grateful! 😀