Kilrathi saga owners: beta testers needed

Howdy.



I came upon the possession of the kilrathi saga recently, and I *hate* what I have to do to get it to play in win7. So I started writing this directdraw hack.

http://iki.fi/sol/zip/ddhack01.zip

The zip contains a ddraw.dll and a readme file.

Usage:
Copy to the application directory (next to the .exe). Play.

F6 toggles between bilinear (smoother) and nearest-neighbor (closer to original) filtering.
F7 toggles logo on and off.

The logo is on the screen for two seconds after start to show that ddhack is active.

ddhack is still at a very early stage, and may be somewhat unstable. It has been mainly tested with the 'kilrathi saga' wing commander 1, but wc2 should also work. If any other directdraw programs work, it's a miracle!

Comments appreciated.

I'll be releasing the sources once I'm somewhat satisfied with it.

Cheers!

A great idea. I think HCl was working on something similar at one point, but unfortunately life for him has been far too busy for WC hacks in recent years. I'll have to grab my KS copy from home, but with the PC Gamer copy released for the birthday, I'm sure there'll be plenty of people on hand to test this right now.

Welcome, and a great starting post this is.

I have dual-screen 64bit win7 corei7 setup myself, so I'd be interested to hear from folks with different setups.

I've noticed some input lag, especially after alt-tabbing for a while, but there's little I can do about that.

Oh, and I wasn't aware of the PC gamer copy, so if an admin could change this thread's title to cover that too, I'd appreciate it. =)

So the sense of this hack is making KS run in win 7 and add a billinear filter to the game?

do you hate the original graphic so much?

does KS have really difficulties in running under win 7? I always thought checking the compatibility mode works fine??

First, I added the bilinear option because it came 'free'.

Second, I prefer the original graphics.

Third, I don't know how things go for other people, but for me, I had to turn on every possible compatibility option, and I still hate the way windows turns into 256 color mode, blows up my window arrangement, etc. And I still got some palette issues even with all the compatibility modes on.

This lets me alt-tab to IM and email and whatever without issues.

An additional bonus, btw, is that the aspect ratio is correct, something that doesn't happen with the native ddraw - the game itself picks 640x480 and adds black bars to top and bottom, with a 640x400 image in the middle. This hack preserves 4:3 aspect ratio for the image. =)

Finally, this should work in any version of windows, not just win7.

good job!

On afterthought, I can see the bilinear being promoted there, but taking a screenshot of the thing in action without it looks just like wing commander normally would, so posting one doesn't really.. you know, tell anything...

Maybe I should do a windowed mode just for the screenshot value.. =)

Tried the free wc1 on my XP netbook with this dll, got "runtime error: r6030 - CRT not initialized".
Ho hum.
Works (as well as it does) without the dll though.

Heh, got it fixed by delay loading the opengl32.dll, but doing that breaks it for win7. Isn't development fun?

Forcing opengl to load with loadlibrary causes win7 to work, and xp to break again. Yee-haw.

I can no longer update the original post, but here's a new version:

http://iki.fi/sol/zip/ddhack02.zip

- added delay loading of OpenGL library to run on winxp (and a kludge to make THAT work with win7).

This should fix the "runtime error: r6030 - CRT not initialized" error from the original if someone else got that too. No other changes at this time.

On second thought, I must say that I like the bilinear filtering a lot more, the WC1 graphics were pretty awful in comparison with wc2

can you post an ingame screenshot with the bilinear filtering ( talking to a character and maybe one shot from inside the cockpit)

It should be fairly similar to what most modern browsers do with zoomed-in images.

The images are 1600x1200, and some of them are rather large (over half a meg apiece). Open in separate tabs for comparison.

Barracks (load/save/view medals)
bed - normal
bed - bilinear
bed - half'n'half

Talking to the bartender
talk - normal
talk - bilinear
talk - half'n'half

Flying
fly - normal
fly - bilinear
fly - half'n'half

Normal - just directly upscaled with point-sample, closest to the original.
Bilinear - The same with bilinear sampling, rather blurry.
Half'n'half - First upscaled to 640x400 in software and then bilinear on hardware. A kind of a tradeoff. You may or may not like it; just something I thought of trying out.

New version here:

http://iki.fi/sol/zip/ddhack03.zip

Adds half'n'half mode (toggled via F6 - normal-bilinear-halfnhalf) and "old lcd" mode (f8), which is just a goofy experiment (stuff leaves trails, basically).

Seriously, I'd love to hear if anyone tries this to hear if it works elsewhere or not.

The Bed - Half/Half demo image seems to be actually just a 'normal' image.

Nope, do a side-by-side comparison (or toggle between tabs) of the fully zoomed images and you'll see there's a slight difference.

Oh, I see. It's a 'half' level filter. I thought 'half and half' meant it would be a split screen like in your first post.