Wing Commander Games and Windows XP - A Summary

Coop421 said:
Yes. No No

This is a really cluttered thread. It'd help if you just reported back what happens when you try those things. What specifically happens when you can't get WC3 working past the intro? Does it lock up? Crash to the desktop? Exhibit poor performance? You can also try an alternate video mode.

Command-Line Parameters for Wing Commander 3 for Windows 95.
If you are experiencing performance problems or other technical difficulties with Wing Commander 3 for Windows 95, you may want to try using one or more of the available "Command-line" parameters for running the game. Since the game normally runs like any Windows 95 program, you will have to open an MS-DOS Prompt within Windows 95 to execute the command-line parameters. Click on START, on PROGRAMS and then on MS-DOS PROMPT. Change to the Wing Commander 3 directory on your hard drive (by typing CD\PROGRA~1\KILRAT~1\WC3). Type "WC3W " followed by one of the following switches:

Command-Line parameters:
-D This forces the hardware "double-buffering" to turn off. Can be helpful with video-related problems.
-NO_INTERLACE This disables the scanline "skipping" in the Wing Commander 3 movies.
-NO_SOUND Use this to disable Wing Commander 3's use of DirectSound.
 
How do I do the adjustments for directx settings and turning up the soundcard hardware acceleration? And what program do i use for xp for that prompt?
 
These are probably questions you should have asked several posts ago. You can find a number of settings in your Sound and Audio Devices menu in the Control Panel. Advanced area of the Audio tab adjusts soundcard hardware acceleration. You don't use any program to try the command line switches. Right click on your Prophecy shortcut and edit the Target in the Properties menu. You can also use the Start->Run box.
 
Can anyone give me a hand here? Trying to play WC3 (KS) on Windows XP. I've installed the Win2k patch, and set Windows 95 compatability, 640x480 resolution, run in 256 colours, disable visual themes and turn off advanced text services.

The game loads, I can talk to Hobbes for the first time fine. If I go the briefing, I see the cutscene then the game just freezes. Or, I can try going into the elevator, the game just freezes.

Reducing video or sound acceleration in the game just causes it to crash. Video is a Geforce 6200 AGP using the latest 81.98 drivers from Nvidia. Sound is onboard CMI 8738 with the latest drivers.

I even installed Windows 98 in VMWare, the game ran ok, but the performance was pretty bad, and the sound was very crackly, so I need to get it running natively on this machine.
 
What works for me is installing the Win2k patch. Next, I set the exe to Windows 2000 compatibility mode. I don't need to do the 640x480, 256 colors, deactivated visual themes or advanced text stuff. (By the way, I installed using the 'better' installation). As soon as I start WC3, I hit alt-enter to get into window mode. I hit ctrl+alt+dlt to get the task manager, right click wc3w.exe under processes, and set priority to normal. I then hit alt-enter again to get full screen for wc3, and there are no more freeze-ups. You can play in a window if you want, as I have never had a freeze-up while in window mode.
 
Win2k is not a particularly easy environment to run WC games in. When NStriker made the KS Win2k patch, he noted that continuing instability with WC3 KS would still be an issue. He just fixed the outstanding conflicts that prevented it from running at all. The above poster's advice is about the best there is. It's possible to get it going, but there may be certain combinations of hardware and drivers that are incompatible.
 
WC1 KS under Windows 2000 - doesn't work!

WC1 KS under Windows 2000 - doesn't work!
I've all the latest fixes, reinstalled DirectX, but it still doesn't work.
It exits immediately after the intro - right at the moment "Start Vega Campaign" shows up.
For some strange reason WC2 KS works fine.
Sorry if this already was discussed.

Thanx in advance, Condotierre.
 
Condotierre said:
WC1 KS under Windows 2000 - doesn't work!
I've all the latest fixes, reinstalled DirectX, but it still doesn't work.
It exits immediately after the intro - right at the moment "Start Vega Campaign" shows up.
For some strange reason WC2 KS works fine.
Sorry if this already was discussed.

How sorry? :) What have you tried so far? Have you enabled Windows 95 compatibility mode? You have to do it via shortcut properties. WIndows 2000 is pretty unfriendly towards trying to get games to run.
 
ChrisReid said:
How sorry? :) What have you tried so far? Have you enabled Windows 95 compatibility mode?
You have to do it via shortcut properties.
Windows 2000 is pretty unfriendly towards trying to get games to run.
Are you sure Windows-2000 HAS such mode? I've looked at shortcut properties, and there's nothing of the sort!
Maybe it exists only in Windows-XP?
 
The mode DOES exist, but it isn't there unless you run some hidden command.

A Guide to Windows 2000:

This is how I managed to get Standoff working on my Windows 2000 SP4 rig. Your mileage may vary.

1. Make sure you are running SP4 with the latest version of everything (drivers and directx).
2. If you have not yet, run this command in start > run: regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll
3. Create a shortcut to the game exe (*not* to the launcher)
4. Bring up the shortcut's properties (right-click menu) and enable Windows 95 compatibility mode (which will now be enabled from the above step)
 
cff said:
The mode DOES exist, but it isn't there unless you run some hidden command.
A Guide to Windows 2000:
This is how I managed to get Standoff working on my Windows 2000 SP4 rig. Your mileage may vary.
1. Make sure you are running SP4 with the latest version of everything (drivers and directx).
That I had.

cff said:
2. If you have not yet, run this command in start > run: regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll
3. Create a shortcut to the game exe (*not* to the launcher)
4. Bring up the shortcut's properties (right-click menu) and enable Windows 95 compatibility mode
(which will now be enabled from the above step)
Thanks! All works! Thank you.

Condotierre.
 
WCP in XP

I have the movie skipping problem in XP. I've read through the replys and have done the following:

Direct X= set sound accel to 0
Sound card options= set accel to 0
Downloaded and added the movie skip patch.

None of these options have worked for me. Is there anything else I can try?

My machine is a P4 2.8 ghz with 512 ram and the sound card is an SB live running on XP sp2.

Also on an unrelated not, I registered for the forum a few weeks ago and I still don't have permission to post. Is there a registration step I missed.

Thanks for the help!
 
lucky13 said:
I have the movie skipping problem in XP. I've read through the replys and have done the following:

Direct X= set sound accel to 0
Sound card options= set accel to 0
Downloaded and added the movie skip patch.

None of these options have worked for me. Is there anything else I can try?

My machine is a P4 2.8 ghz with 512 ram and the sound card is an SB live running on XP sp2.

Not really.. all those things are ordinarily sure-fire ways to solve the problem. Sounds like something larger is going on. Do you have sound problems in anything else? Does your soundblaster show up with no issues in the device manager?

lucky13 said:
Also on an unrelated not, I registered for the forum a few weeks ago and I still don't have permission to post. Is there a registration step I missed.

Must be. Email the administration link with details about your situation.
 
Thanks for the reply.

I uninstalled the game, directx, and my drivers, reloaded everything and WCP is working well now (some parts are like watching a Sergio Leone western but thats cool). I must have had a conflict somewhere that I didn't see. I'll contact admin about that other thing. Thanks again!
 
The best solution for playing old Wing Commander games:
get a good ol' DOS or Win95 PC and have fun like the good old times...the only problem is to get those goddam old pieces of junk (aka PCs) to run...as I try at the moment...^^
 
Ah the good ol' days :) . . .

Blakc-Wulf said:
The best solution for playing old Wing Commander games:
get a good ol' DOS or Win95 PC and have fun like the good old times...the only problem is to get those goddam old pieces of junk (aka PCs) to run...as I try at the moment...^^
 
Hi, been reading these threads about compatibility with WinXP extensively over the past two days. I've actually got complete copies of the deluxe editions of WC I and II, and they run perfectly in DosBox, so I'm mainly concerned with WCIII. (kind of ironic.. I ran it in Win95 with no problem back around 1998 :p)

I've got both the Kilrathi Saga, and an old copy of the WCIII classics release, and unfortunately, neither will work correctly in XP.. well, sort of.

Kilrathi Saga edition didn't work at all at first, froze up like the many others at the startup sequence. When I set it to Win95 compatibility mode, and check all the available boxes, the game actually gets moderately playable. Video sequences don't crash it oddly, and I can move around and talk with any character with no problems. Simulator runs perfectly as well, great performance.

Except: I discovered it is impossible to progress through the game. I can fly the first mission, no problems. Come back and land, and the landing sequence plays. After that sequence finishes though, game over- blank screen, and it's frozen solid. No way to get to the terminal to save. If I press esc fast enough during landing, it'll skip, and I'll be back on the deck, but clicking anything after that crashes the game. (Now that I think about it, maybe I was able to save at the terminal after skipping the scene, have to check that again.) So, basically, I'm stuck at the first mission forever.

Original WCIII I can actually get to run fairly decent using the steps in the recent VDMSound fix topic.. just as long as I don't use a joystick. :( The joystick calibration never quite works, and while it does calibrate, in game the joystick jumps around like mad, making aiming nearly impossible. It will jerk at random intervals toward the upper right no matter how I calibrate it.

The most success I've had was with DosBox actually. I found settings that ran the game reasonably well (quite a bit of sound delay, but at least it played), but it was pretty unstable, and would crash easily for weird reasons.

Now, something odd that I only really discovered by accident. I don't know if it's already known, but it might give a hint as to why the KS version of WCIII freezes up.

I was testing settings on my KS WCIII exe, after giving up on the dos version... however.. I left the dos version cd in the drive. I accidentally double clicked the program, thinking, eh, oh well, it'll just ask me for the cd. Nope. It ran just fine, till again, I got to the end of the first mission, and it froze.

So, for all intensive purposes, KS will read the original WCIII cds for playing the KS WCIII. There is one major difference I noticed though. When playing the dos version, the cutscenes are normal video, while the KS version plays interlaced cutscenes. BUT: The KS version, when run with the dos cds will still play the interlaced cutscenes. So, the interlacing is not within the movie files. I was running on a minimum install of the KS WCIII, meaning I was using the old dos version movie files, directly from the cd. So there are only a few possibilities as to why this could happen.

I ran a few other checks, and it seems the video files themselves have not changed since the dos WCIII. The interlacing appears to be introduced by the Xanmovie player, which wasn't used in the dos version. Since video sequences seem to be the leading cause of WCIII crashing, I'm going to go right ahead and say it: it looks like Xanmovie is the culprit in some way

After reading a news item from the main page (from a ways back I think, don't know the date) about how the XanMovie .dll is really just a video codec, I'm curious... could installing an updated XanMovie codec into WinXP fix the video crashes? And if so, does one even exist? Or would we just have to install the old version as a codec to make windows tolerate it better? The problem might be caused by WinXP's method of codec application, which is sure to be very different from Win95's.

If anyone has any tips on getting the joystick running smoothly in VDMSound or Dosbox for WCIII, I'll be plenty happy. But I'd much rather get the KS version running, as it runs so much more smoothly, besides the throttle/rudder support.
 
Unregistered said:
So, for all intensive purposes, KS will read the original WCIII cds for playing the KS WCIII. There is one major difference I noticed though. When playing the dos version, the cutscenes are normal video, while the KS version plays interlaced cutscenes. BUT: The KS version, when run with the dos cds will still play the interlaced cutscenes. So, the interlacing is not within the movie files. I was running on a minimum install of the KS WCIII, meaning I was using the old dos version movie files, directly from the cd. So there are only a few possibilities as to why this could happen.

I ran a few other checks, and it seems the video files themselves have not changed since the dos WCIII. The interlacing appears to be introduced by the Xanmovie player, which wasn't used in the dos version. Since video sequences seem to be the leading cause of WCIII crashing, I'm going to go right ahead and say it: it looks like Xanmovie is the culprit in some way

After reading a news item from the main page (from a ways back I think, don't know the date) about how the XanMovie .dll is really just a video codec, I'm curious... could installing an updated XanMovie codec into WinXP fix the video crashes? And if so, does one even exist? Or would we just have to install the old version as a codec to make windows tolerate it better? The problem might be caused by WinXP's method of codec application, which is sure to be very different from Win95's.

IIRC if you put "wc3.exe -no_interlace" into the command line it should get rid of the interlacing in Kilrathi saga. I know for sure the same thing works for WC4 though.
 
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