VOGONS


First post, by SCAgent

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Hey everyone, I recently remembered and wanted to replay this old childhood classic of mine.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/prisoner-of-war-world-war-ii

It installed fine and runs with no problems (I used a no-cd fix, the game has safedisk drm, unplayable in windows vista and above)

However it has 2 issues, one the game has a darn 30fps lock on PC, and two it doesn't support 1080p resolutions.
For the first problem I wonder if anyone is tech savvy enough and has the time and interest to find a way to unlock the fps cap?

As for playing with higher resolutions, the game uses DX8.1 I tried using Dgvoodoo to force a higher res, unfortunately the game doesn't launch at all with dgvoodoo enabled (DX12 api), with DX11 it works but there is a font issue and everything in-game is white, I have an AMD card and as I know its a known problem and the only way to fix it is by using DX12 which is what I always do but in this case the game refuses to launch.

Can anyone offer some help here? I can provide you guys with the .ISO and the raw game files if you need them.

I would love to revisit this flawed classic with a bit of a modern touch, 30fps and low res is a bit of a dealbreaker, might try to emulate it on pcsx2, but i would love to try and see if there is any chance the PC version can become playable.
Thanks!

Reply 2 of 13, by SCAgent

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Yes sir, that fixed it!! I did have afterburner/rivatuner in the background, once I disabled them, it does launch now in DX12 and with a crisp and clean 1920x1080 resolution!!! I also added some MSAA and anisotropic filtering and the game looks much better now!!

Would you by any chance have any idea about the 32fps lock? Its really annoying, my young teenage self didn't mind back then but now its really noticeable

Reply 4 of 13, by SCAgent

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Been searching for a fix all day today , nothing on the net but some reddit and WSGF posts asking for widescreen fixes, the games config is pretty weird as well, its just a options.wiv file that can be opened with notepad++ but none of the options there are much help, its a forgotten game, it didn't even have a PCGamingWiki page until yesterday when I made one, first time I had that happen.

Funny thing, I got the game to work on pcsx2, it plays at 60fps smooth, but it does have some slow-downs so its not perfect, need to tinker with it a bit more, It does have a built in widescreen fix for it, so maybe it also unlocks the framerate, I believe the engine is the same one as Operation Flashpoint : Cold War Crisis (Real Virtuality) which does support 60fps, so I guess we can chuck it up to a bad pc port of the time, real shame 🙁

Reply 5 of 13, by Dege

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You could try to restart your computer to zero the OS uptime and see if anything changes. For example, Extreme G-2 is a game where the actual FPS depends on the uptime because of the inaccurate (float precision instead of double) internal timing calculations: the higher uptime, the lower FPS...

Reply 7 of 13, by diegoparedeshd1

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SCAgent wrote on 2022-05-08, 13:15:

Been searching for a fix all day today , nothing on the net but some reddit and WSGF posts asking for widescreen fixes, the games config is pretty weird as well, its just a options.wiv file that can be opened with notepad++ but none of the options there are much help, its a forgotten game, it didn't even have a PCGamingWiki page until yesterday when I made one, first time I had that happen.

Funny thing, I got the game to work on pcsx2, it plays at 60fps smooth, but it does have some slow-downs so its not perfect, need to tinker with it a bit more, It does have a built in widescreen fix for it, so maybe it also unlocks the framerate, I believe the engine is the same one as Operation Flashpoint : Cold War Crisis (Real Virtuality) which does support 60fps, so I guess we can chuck it up to a bad pc port of the time, real shame 🙁

that the pscx2 emulator says 60fps does not mean that the game runs at 60fps since those fps are the fps of the emulator not those of the game. Probably the game on ps2 also runs at 30fps internal by default

Reply 10 of 13, by MagikGimp

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(Continuing from PCGW)
Setting the graphics to High using the modified launcher found on a no CD site seemed to make the game run better for me? But that might just be my imagination. Still, being able to run the game in 1080 or whatever has to be an improvement over the PS2 version. If I had to guess I doubt there's much difference between the two in terms of framerate. I watched that video and while it does seem a little better at the start, it still seems around 30FPS to me; not liquid smooth in other words. Not to mention the PS2 was rendering at what, 480 or something?
Running the PC version without dgvoodoo (although it's just passing through to regular rendering anyway I should imagine) on High at a higher res; is it really that off-putting to play?

Reply 11 of 13, by SCAgent

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MagikGimp wrote on 2022-08-05, 01:55:

(Continuing from PCGW)
Setting the graphics to High using the modified launcher found on a no CD site seemed to make the game run better for me? But that might just be my imagination. Still, being able to run the game in 1080 or whatever has to be an improvement over the PS2 version. If I had to guess I doubt there's much difference between the two in terms of framerate. I watched that video and while it does seem a little better at the start, it still seems around 30FPS to me; not liquid smooth in other words. Not to mention the PS2 was rendering at what, 480 or something?
Running the PC version without dgvoodoo (although it's just passing through to regular rendering anyway I should imagine) on High at a higher res; is it really that off-putting to play?

You should use a monitoring program to check your framerates/frametime (like rivatuner) to see if the game runs better or not with/without the modified launcher, I use the same modified nocd exe's

For me personally the PCSX2 emulator version is the best way to play this at the moment, I can force a 1080p resolution, anti-aliasing and there are some widescreen hacks (though you need to enable them manually) that force the game's UI and framerate to be at solid 60 for the most part, unfortunately at some areas the FPS will drop to 30 and you will have to tinker with the settings to improve the performance.
Biggest problem is that you have to use a controller which I dislike.

30fps on PC is nauseating and headache inducing for me, at least in my age, when I was a teen it didn't bother me, now I couldn't play for more than 5min before I needed to close my eyes and rest, until a fix is made I recommend trying an emulator

there is a widescreen fix for PC here, hopefully a FPS fix will be viable sometime in the future as well.

https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file … d-war-ii-fixes/

Reply 12 of 13, by dccs

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Yeah I agree, the game's framerate just isn't natural at all, I remember the PS2 and Xbox versions running better than this PC version. Also seems like a lazy PC port, with very low res textures and simple shading, even for 2002 standards. I was trying to find out the specific hex address in the EXE file to unlock the 32FPS cap, made some progress here and there, but nothing significant yet. If someone comes up with a solution for that, just leave a comment here.

Reply 13 of 13, by TgamesFR

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For some who was long waiting for a 60 FPS patch for this game i've made one 😀

I've published today on my website the 60 FPS on Prisoner of War: World War II and Pilot Down: Behind Enemy Lines.

Both game were made by the same company and they both share same engine and use DirectX 8.1.

My patch also include Widescreen forcing at 1080p, removal of Securom and NO-CD ! 😎

Here some screenshots to show in actions the 60 FPS on theses games.

prisoner.png

pilot.png