New Privateer 2 Patch Adds Deinterlace Feature & Makes Numerous Improvements (October 1, 2013)

AD

Finder of things, Doer of stuff
The release of Privateer 2 on GOG recently provided us with the perfect opportunity to release a project that's been in various stages of development for a while. We've been working on a Privateer 2 patch and are pleased to present the initial "beta" version to everyone. This patch will update your gamefiles to a Windows version with a number of bugfixes and minor enhancements, not the least of which include removing the interlacing from the FMV. As usual, we must mention HCl who deserves much credit as he worked his magic and did the lion's share of the work that made this possible.

You can download the patch here (500 k zip). Simply unzip it into your Privateer 2 installation directory. The patch will preserve your original GOG install though. To play the patched version you will then run darkfix.exe instead of dark.exe

This patch can be used on either the GOG version of the game or the original DOS and Windows versions. If, however, you are running either regular DOS Privateer 2 or the Deluxe Windows version and not the GOG version, we strongly recommend copying all 3 CDs to the hard drive, as this is what darkfix.exe is expecting, and the patch wasn't tested for running the game from the CDs.





Current features include:

  • Random crashes which froze the game were solved.
  • Mouse issues were fixed: the mouse tended to become unresponsive in
    some situations.
  • More stable digital sound (fixes some sound crackling issues that
    occured often)
  • Deinterlace patch: no horizontal black lines, which is a bit more
    friendly towards modern displays
  • Speed stabilization: the game plays at acceptable speeds, without
    slowdowns when near a planet or ship. The gameflow parts (rooms, PAD, and so on) are also slowed down by the current patch.
  • No-cd patch. (Requires copying all CDs to your Dark directory)



We're also looking at tweaking the patch further to make the game run more smoothly and to lower CPU usage, so please don't forget to leave feedback so we can quash any bugs. In the future we may even make an installer to automate the patching process and to create the appropriate shortcuts.






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Original update published on October 1, 2013
 
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I've updated the front page news article but that doesn't help the thread here... anyway, if you aren't getting inflight music, set the compatibility mode on darkfix.exe to either win95 or 98 and you should get music.
 
How does the patch handle the CD change quirks of P2? That is - currently P2 selects random missions that require movies by the CD in the drive. As now all CDs are in the drive do all of them get selected randomly? Or just from one of the CDs? Or...?
 
Per HCl, the no-cd fix "works by simulating a CD change". You *should* get all the proper random encounters.
 
How about adding some (optional, activated with a checkbox or something) gameplay tweaks? Even just disabling the endless enemy respawns would go a long way towards making Priv 2 actually playable.
 
I use CoolSoft's virtualMIDISynth instead of the default Microsoft Wavetable synth. Win 7 64 ult. Whenever I launch into spaceflight the game hangs. There's a pause whenever midi is activated with virtualMIDISynth, it takes time for the soundfont to load into memory. I assume it's this lag that causes the game to hang. I've tried this with smaller soundfonts (11mb) as the standard one I use is over 1Gb. I'm fine sticking with default microsoft midi emulation, but I just thought I'd post it for information.
 
How do I properly copy all the files from the CD's to the hard drive? Copy all files to /Dark? What about duplicate file names?
 
How do I properly copy all the files from the CD's to the hard drive? Copy all files to /Dark? What about duplicate file names?

Yeah, just copy all the files and subfolders to your Dark directory. Overwriting is fine. But you'll want to apply any patches after just to make sure you aren't overwriting the patch files... The only thing I need to double check with HCl on is if you need to install the game before copying to the directory or if you can just go ahead and create the c:/dark directory and copy all the disks there.
 
Yeah, just copy all the files and subfolders to your Dark directory. Overwriting is fine. But you'll want to apply any patches after just to make sure you aren't overwriting the patch files... The only thing I need to double check with HCl on is if you need to install the game before copying to the directory or if you can just go ahead and create the c:/dark directory and copy all the disks there.

Thanks! Will wait for your updated info...
 
Thanks for the comments!

Quarto: gameplay tweaks are definitely a possibility, although i'll probably prioritize fixes related to game stability. I'm with you on the endless respawn waves though.. I can't say i encounter them often, but when I do, yeah they can be annoying.

Oceankhayne: thanks for the feedback, that's definitely useful to know. Admittedly, we didn't test the patch with third-party MIDI synths, but i'll try to reproduce the issue sometime within the next few days and see if a work-around can be found (no promises at this point, though).

Riddler / AD: just copying the files without installing should be fine. I don't think the game has any registry dependencies (besides, just unzipping the patch into the GOG release seems to work, and it is based on the DOS version)

edit: don't forget to edit DARK.FIX if you copy the game files into a drive other than C:
 
Quarto: gameplay tweaks are definitely a possibility, although i'll probably prioritize fixes related to game stability. I'm with you on the endless respawn waves though.. I can't say i encounter them often, but when I do, yeah they can be annoying.

If ever you the opportunity and inclination to add decent Wing Commander style mouse support I am sending you a bottle of Whiskey as a thank you. I really love Privateer 2 but haven't had a Joystick I'm happy with in years :(
Unlike Quarto I never took issue with Privateer 2's gameplay, rather loved it infact - certainly there is room for improvement but I don't feel anything is broken, not any more so than for example I would say the balancing in Wing Commander IV is for example.
 
When you say WC-style mouse support, are you referring to the up/down axes? It's possible to invert those during spaceflight, on the options menu (Alt+O) click on Flight Model Orientation.

If you mean an actual visible mouse cursor, that might still happen sometime down the road, as i'm already wrapping DirectInput to fix a couple mouse-related issues.

Personally, i still can't play without a joystick. As much as I try I can't get used to mouse control...
 
Well that's awesome. Huge thankyou to you guys for getting this done. Finally playable-out-of-the-proverbial-box!

I would add to the gameplay tweaks wishlist 'remove enemy levelling'. So you actually get a payoff for upgrading your ship & doing the hard yards trading etc. etc.
 
Just a quick note regarding virtualMIDISynth:

While i still didn't manage to do extensive testing, i managed to install virtualMIDISynth in my WinXP VM and download a couple of sound fonts for testing. The results were good, i didn't come across any problems (although Win95 compatibility was still needed to get Midi music). For reference, I tried sound fonts TimGM6mb.sf2 (5mb) and GeneralUser GS SoftSynth v1.44.sf2 (30mb), and both seem to work fine.

I will try repeating the process in Win7 64-bit this weekend, both with these soundfonts and larger ones, and see if i can reproduce the problem reported by Oceankhayne. It could be some issue related to some Midi differences between Win Vista / 7 and earlier Windows versions. One thing i noticed is that the latest version of virtualMIDISynth fixes a few bugs that caused crashes when used with DOSBox, so something similar may be happening here. If anyone wants to try virtualMIDISynth with P2, make sure you have the latest version (1.8.1).

There is definitely an improvement in quality when using an alternate MIDI synthesizer such as virtualMIDISynth, so i'll definitely try to include it on my next tests and see how the patch behaves with it.
 
When you say WC-style mouse support, are you referring to the up/down axes? It's possible to invert those during spaceflight, on the options menu (Alt+O) click on Flight Model Orientation.

If you mean an actual visible mouse cursor, that might still happen sometime down the road, as i'm already wrapping DirectInput to fix a couple mouse-related issues.

Personally, i still can't play without a joystick. As much as I try I can't get used to mouse control...

I mean the on screen mouse icon. I couldn't use a mouse either until a time when I didn't have a Joystick available and had to try the mouse. It took some time but I got used to it - Prophecy's mouse implementation in particular is pretty good - I found WC3/4's central screen confined cursor a little difficult and Privateer 2's very frustrating.
 
Note: The soundfonts I've tried are SGM-V2.01.sf2, CrisisGM301.sf2, ChaosBank.sf2, and GeneralUser GS FluidSynth 1.44.sf2.

All without success on Win 7 64.
Remember HCl (if you don't know already), Microsoft changed the hardware abstraction layer after XP.

It's nice to know it works under xp. Time to grab a vmware workstation trial I guess.
 
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I just tried it on my work laptop, HP Elitebook 8440p, Win7 64 Professional.

It worked! I did not have to tweak the patch in any way.

Oceankhayne, can you check your version of virtualMIDISynth and make sure you have version 1.8.1 installed?

The only thing i can think of that is probably worth mentioning is that i checked the option to "Set Coolsoft VirtualMIDISynth as your default MIDI Out Device" during installation.

I'll test a bit more tonight!
 
I'll have to give this patch a shot. The last Windows patch wouldn't show spaceflight (a big part of the game) on my XP machine.
 
I'm away from my home pc at the moment, but I can verify that I'm using 1.8.1. I have three "audio cards" in my pc though, the onboard, an essence stx, and an nvidia codec. The audio setup on my desktop isn't ideal. If it does work for you, then it's something on my end. All that flag does is set your midi mapper to default to MIDISynth instead of the microsoft model. Windows 8 dumps this (midi mapper) entirely and only uses the last installed midi driver. Thanks for looking into it anyway HCl.
 
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