KS WC3 + Mash patch + DDHack = success?

Mincemeat

Doomsday's Neighbour
Armed with nothing but a hex-editor, I've managed to get the Kilrathi Saga WC3 working with Mash's patch and ddhack...

Strangely enough, ddhack by itself won't work on my XP environment, but runs combined with Mash's patch? (I get a black screen if I tried ddhack on its own)

This is what I did...

1. Download Mash's patch and extract to my C:\Program Files\Kilrathi Saga\WC3 directory. Rename his ddraw.dll to mashp.dll
2. Hex edit WC3W.EXE, replace all instances of ddraw.dll with mashp.dll (should be one occurence)
3. Test WC3W to ensure Mash's patch is taking effect.
4. Download ddhack and extract to the Kilrathi Saga WC3 directory.
5. Rename the ddhack ddraw.dll to dhack.dll. Move only that file to C:\Windows\System32 (or whatever Vista/7 equivalent)
4. From what I understand, Mash's patch intercepts the game's DirectDrawCreate call, does its thing, then makes DirectDrawCreate call from the real ddraw.dll. It specifically gets the system path using GetSystemDirectoryA to load the real ddraw.dll...
5. I then hex-edited mashp.dll, replacing all instances of ddraw.dll with dhack.dll (should be two instances)
6. Now, with Mash's patch looking for dhack.dll from the system directory, it somehow successfully loaded ddhack. Note that the ddhack config file needs to stay in the WC3 directory.

Haven't played it for any extended period of time but it seems to work fine. Proceed at your own risk :)
 
Not sure if your aware, but I updated the movie fix recently to use dsound.dll rather than ddraw.dll. So you should be able to use both patches together without the need to hex edit the exe.
It made the news page at the time, Here's the link.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks Mash, I realised that you have made new version hooking into dsound.

On my XP system, if I try to use ddhack by itself (or in conjunction with your new dsound patch), the game would not run but be stuck with a black screen.

But if I let ddhack "piggyback" on top of your original ddraw patch, then ddhack would actually work... I don't have enough knowledge of win32 innards to know what the difference might be?
 
Mincemeat would you be willing to make a pack and upload the two hex edited files? i have XP and just bought a copy of KS and would love to try your fix if possible but i have not hex edited anything in ages...and frankly don't remember how i did it back when.
 
I use HxD (http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/) to do the hex-editing. All I did was basically string replacement and most hex editors will allow you to search by string.

Once you stare at the screen it should all come back to you rather quickly, since you have done this sort of thing before. :)
 
Back
Top