ddhack doesn't appear to work with any of the ddraw sdk samples
Has any1 given any thought on how to add support for games that load ddraw via CoCreateInstance() ?

3D Ultra RC Racers - Fixes color corruption. Max res limited to 800x600 with ddhack
Abuse (Windows) - doesn't work. Game will not execute.
Diablo - Doesn't work. ddraw error.
Dink Smallwood - White screen on main menu. Unable to see anything.
Worms Armageddon Demo - Black screen on execution.
Uprising 2 Demo - Black screen on execution
101 The 101st Airborne in Normandy - Main Menu screen actually pops up but graphics are corrupted.
Neverhood demo - Solid block of color fills the screen
Savage for Windows 95 - Black screen in a window. (Without ddhack you get corrupted graphics in fullscreen)

http://hifi.iki.fi/cnc-ddraw/

Project similat to ddhack for C&C.

Great minds think alike, I see =)

Savage for windows 95? what sort of game is it? (and, most important, how to get a copy?)
I'd like to make some attempts to support it with DxWnd ....

Pretty savage necropost, but we''ll let it slide since it's the DxWnd author 😀

By the way, I noticed that on Windows 10 Anniversary the main problem with 8-bit palette (broken colors) seems to be fixed, at least on the games I tried.
The main reason for DirectDraw wrappers is gone 😀

And contrary to popular belief, it was not a problem with DirectDraw per se - which works fine - but with 8-bit color modes regardless of ddraw.

Azarien wrote:

And contrary to popular belief, it was not a problem with DirectDraw per se - which works fine - but with 8-bit color modes regardless of ddraw.

Yes, and as I understood it, it is 'by design'. That is, in a system where you REALLY use an 8-bit mode, the system might have to 'steal' some palette colours from time to time, to show GUI elements. There are WM_PALETTEISCHANGING and WM_PALETTECHANGED messages for that:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... s.85).aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... s.85).aspx

But no application ever bothers to handle those of course 😀
I believe one of the "compatibility" options that you can set in the registry can actually block these messages, so the problem is fixed: https://www.sevenforums.com/gaming/100379-how … indows-7-a.html

Scali wrote:

Yes, and as I understood it, it is 'by design'. That is, in a system where you REALLY use an 8-bit mode, the system might have to 'steal' some palette colours from time to time, to show GUI elements. There are WM_PALETTEISCHANGING and WM_PALETTECHANGED messages for that:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... s.85).aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... s.85).aspx

Except that on Vista/7/8 they don't work properly. Once in a while you got colors stolen by explorer.exe without any notification.
On the other hand, if you use DirectDraw with 32-bit color - no problem with that.

Wasn't the 8-bit palette problem already fixed in Windows 8?

I don't know. When I tried to run my 8-bit mode demo program on Windows 8 (or 8.1) it didn't work at all.
What I know is that Vista and 7 are heavily affected, and 10 is not.
On XP the color bug can also appear albeit very rarely.

I have made a custom build of Quake 1 that fakes the 8-bit mode in software, using 32-bit color mode at the cost of about 10% fps.

ghotik2002 wrote:

Savage for windows 95? what sort of game is it? (and, most important, how to get a copy?)
I'd like to make some attempts to support it with DxWnd ....

It's the demo for Savage The Big Hunt.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwC_OlSsxC1 … Z3J4VE04NFplYXc

I think the rainbow palette problem was gone in Windows 8, but something else was broken related to 8-bit palettes. Some games that use 8-bit palette apparently fail to initialize on Windows 8+ while they work on Windows 7. Soulbringer quits with an error message if you select software 8-bit mode.

Uhm, it seems I saw the reply to my question a bit late, but anyway thank you: I got the demo and found it running in DxWnd with very little tuning. Probably some more work should be done to handle the mouse and keyboard (they seem trapped in the game). Here are some screenshots from Win10.