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Palace of Deceit: Dragon's Plight (VB1): Is it possible to defeat the resolution check?

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First post, by Andrew T.

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Palace of Deceit: Dragon's Plight is an old favourite of mine: A point-and-click graphical adventure made by Cliff Bleszinski, pre-Epic.

The game refuses to run at resolutions above 640x480, with a pop-up whinge (attached). When I still had a functional Windows 95 system (RIP) I took this in stride, stepping down the resolution whenever I ran the executable. Unfortunately, that isn't an option on a widescreen laptop with Windows 7...and the myriad "compatibility mode" options don't make a lick of difference!

What frustrates me is that this is a bog standard Visual Basic 1 application. There's nothing that should prevent it from running on a modern system; provided you use a 32-bit Windows version. The game's successor Dare to Dream was also coded in VB1, and runs fine on Windows 7 and presumably 10.

Would it be possible to remove the resolution check from the program through hex editing or some other method?

Reply 1 of 2, by VGApocalypse

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First of all, I may not providing you with the most desirable solution here, but I am delighted to see that I am not the only one to have enjoyed that little gem back in the days. And I still do...

Albeit I do so on my 486DX-33 build and reconstructed that build in PCem on my company laptop, too.
If you don't mind spending some two hours to get your virtual Windows 3.1 (or in fact any Windows up to 98 for Palace of Deceit: Dragon's Plight) running in PCem, that would be my way to go. Looks very nice in aspect-ratio correct fullscreen despite the low resolution and works like a charm.

PCem V14 definitely works well in Windows 7, newer versions might as well - but I am not too sure about that.
Happy Garth-slaying!

Hoarding the precious, worshipping the ancient, playing the forgotten.

Reply 2 of 2, by yliopp Larvanto

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So it is presumably a 16-bit executable in which case I would try to run it through otvdm (winevdm) using a modern 64-bit Windows OS. Placing vbrun100.dll in otvdm system (or dll) directory instead of the real Windows system directory. You can then set the needed 640x480 compatibility for otvdm instead of the actual game executable.

That said maybe otvdm also works with 32-bit Windows 7?

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