Ive had it running in xp
no luck with the demo in win 7

Maybe you can try Dege's newest dgVoodoo which wraps Direct3D to see what happens! 😀
http://dege.fw.hu

I had a quick play with that on various games, and nothing worked at all. Do you know if you just need to put the two files in the MS folder in the game's install folder, plus the dgVoodoo configuration app, then it should work? One game (I think it was Motocross Madness 2) found the dgVoodoo as an option, but still crashed 😒

You just place the dll files in the MS folder in the game folder.

It doesn't work if anyone's wondering.

DXGL gets farther (renders some intro screens then crashes to desktop at what I think is the "detecting hardware" phase).

Edit: Oh and Microsoft's builtin compatibility fixes is part of the problem. Rename the exe to something else and run it in standard XP compatibility mode and it should work (at 5 FPS if you're using Windows 8 )

Maybe ACT 5.x or 6.0 has the options to fix it. I just don't have the game to test.

8-bit and 16-bit color games often have terrible performance in Windows 8, there's no ACT fixes that help. There's two: one that will help performance a little (but definitely won't save a 5 FPS game) and one that basically hides 8-bit and 16-bit modes and hopes the application falls back to 32-bit mode.

If it's 8-bit or 16-bit, you better hope there's a wrapper that works that's better than Microsoft's. Things not to try:

dgVoodoo: DDraw Error: Unable to open screen.
DXGL: crash at hardware detection.
DXWnd: 10-30 FPS.
D3DWindower: Worse than DXWnd.
VMWare: Its virtual 3D adapter does not support a required function. Seems to run at a nice 60 FPS though, so I'm guessing this game works nicely in WinXP/Win7.

filipetolhuizen wrote:

Maybe ACT 5.x or 6.0 has the options to fix it. I just don't have the game to test.

http://www.fileplanet.com/10977/10000/fileinf … owerboat-Racing
(That's the demo)

I tried its demo, and it ended up in 'DDraw Error: Unable to open screen' as ZellSF wrote.
This game uses 640x400 16 bit videomode which wasn't enumerated by dgVoodoo (a bug, again), that's why the error message comes.
Modern adapters does not enumerate such low resolutions so dgVoodoo additionally forces all 'classic' (320x200, 320x400, 640x400, etc) resolutions in its enumeration.

When I fixed it, the game worked fine with 60FPS. Altough I got a crash at quit with the debug version so I have to check that later.

This is a game where the ability to force a higher rendering resolution would come in handy (I read you thought no games would have use of that).

Indeed. But I would like to fix as many bugs as can be before doing development on that.

If the game crashes due to missing 640x400 resolution, just add it to the main .inf file in the drivers install folder, if it's a nvidia card.

I tried adding it as a custom resolution in Nvidia control panel, it wasn't very cooperative.
Works perfectly on Intel integrated graphics though.

I added it as a custom resolution through the nVidia control panel and the game now works natively.

You'll have better results if you add the resolution to the .inf file before installing the drivers rather than adding as a custom resolution.

Dege wrote:

I added it as a custom resolution through the nVidia control panel and the game now works natively.

It works nicely natively in Windows versions released before Windows 8.

Windows 8 and later and the performance so bad it's unplayable. Windows 8 has dropped native support for 8 and 16 bit color and runs that through an emulation layer that's... not very good.

This all looks like good stuff! Dege, adding 16bit mode would probably allow a good number of other games to work. I've had problems with games requiring retained mode on Nvidia 980, namely Super Taxi Driver having many white textures and Even Knieval having no bike or objects visible.

VirtuaIceMan wrote:

This all looks like good stuff! Dege, adding 16bit mode would probably allow a good number of other games to work. I've had problems with games requiring retained mode on Nvidia 980, namely Super Taxi Driver having many white textures and Even Knieval having no bike or objects visible.

It supports 16 bit modes. All the classic resolutions plus the ones enumerated by the graphics driver are supported in 8, 16 and 32 bit depth.
Well, the classic ones now enumerated with 8 bit only, due to the bug I mentioned.

Also, all classic texture formats are supported because most of the applications relies on them. In practice an app can't be expected to fall back to a subset of formats. That is only theory. 😀
It's very common that if a texture format is unsupported then a game fails to start or miss the textures in question. The programmers won't write tons of code paths for various formats and capability bits. They only targets the current low- or mid-end card with their known capabilities and adjust their code according to that.
So, a full contemporary environment has to be emulated.

All 'bit depth' is virtual to the applications because dgVoodoo always uses or converts to 32bit internally, so the graphic driver is not expected to support them. It cannot even do because they are missing from the API of DXGI/D3D11 itself.

So, those games should work, but if they don't, there may be other problems than just D3D emulation, like other Windows enviroment incompatibility, etc. I will do more tests on very old games to see what we have.

Dege
You are an absolute Hero...................

@DGVoodoo 2.55 Does it look OK ??? I do not really know ..... 60 hz v-sync is steady...... the game itself is a dinosaure from the Direct-x 5 era........

Config : ASUS PRIME H270 PRO / CORE i7-7700/ 16 GB DDR2400 / MSI GTX1060 6GT OCV1 @391.01/ Moniteur @1080p ...WINDOWS 10 64 bits V1803 @17134.254