Wing IV DVD-ROM

R

rjspring

Rear Admiral
Has anybody played Wing IV on DVD? Does it feature DVD quality video and audio or is it the same quality as the CD's only on one DVD disk? As I remember, Wing IV DVD was bundled with the Creative DVD-ROM drive and not sold seperately.... will the DVD work with any DVD-ROM drive?
 
There are two types of WC4 DVD.

First one was bundled with Creative Labs DVD 1x-5x kits. Double-sided, and required the hardware video decoder card that came with the DVD kit to play the movies. This version has theater-quality video and sound, as well as the various Win95 version features (Direct[Sound/Input/etc] support being the biggest feature).

The other one is a special OEM deal that's just the Win95 version of WC4 put onto one double-density single-side DVD, with the non-data side having the same basic design as the regular CD version (yellow-orange background, Black Lance triangle in the middle). It has the same video and sound quality of the original DOS version release, but with the ability to eliminate the black lines breaking up the image with a command line option in the shortcut (just stretches the image to fill in the blanks, though, so the non-interlaced video looks kinda ugly, IMO), as well as Direct[stuff] support.

Either version will work with any DVD drive, but as noted above, with the first version you can only see the movies with the hardware decoder card installed.
 
Well, I actually found the dual sided DVD for Wing IV, but from your post's suggestions I also will need the decoder card that came with the DVD-ROM. I have found a couple such cards, the iteration that came with the Wing IV game was the Dxr2 decoder card that since then creative has released the Dxr3 card. Most computer processors are fast enough now (over 700 MHZ from what I have researched) that the decoder card is no longer needed..... do you know if this is the case with Wing IV DVD or does the game actually require the card to be present?
 
Dxr(2/3) is required by the video codec used to display the movies (IIRC, details are kinda fuzzy), it's not an issue of system firepower. When WC4-DVD first came out there really wasn't anything in the way of DVD standards, nor really fast enough CPUs/vidcards to do software decoding. By the time the later CL DVD kits came out, systems were starting to have the power to do it, but there wasn't really any benefit to re-code the DVD release to not require the hardware decoder card (especially not a financial benefit, as you needed to buy the card, which made EA and Creative happy... EA didn't have to worry about distribution, and CL got more people buying their stuff).
 
rjspring said:
Well, I actually found the dual sided DVD for Wing IV, but from your post's suggestions I also will need the decoder card that came with the DVD-ROM. I have found a couple such cards, the iteration that came with the Wing IV game was the Dxr2 decoder card that since then creative has released the Dxr3 card. Most computer processors are fast enough now (over 700 MHZ from what I have researched) that the decoder card is no longer needed..... do you know if this is the case with Wing IV DVD or does the game actually require the card to be present?
Click to expand...


on the side note: you only need a DVD player, such as Power DVD, to watch movies...
 
Tolwyn said:
on the side note: you only need a DVD player, such as Power DVD, to watch movies...
Click to expand...

That's true, but to watch the movies from within the game, as part of the plot, requires the decoder card. One could, in theory, get the list of WC4 movie files, open up a DVD player, and alt-tab between it and WC4, playing the video file corresponding to the scene in the game at the appropriate time, but it's a really ugly way of doing things, and I vaguely recall the game not liking it too much when it couldn't play the relevant video file.
 
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Would be illegal to make it(WC4 the dual sided version) video playble without the decoder?

I've been trying to hunt down Kilarthi Saga and WC4 everywhere but only EBAY has it. Unfortunately they don't seem to ship outside USA!
 
I'm sure it wouldn't be illegal -- in fact, the people who did the DVD have expressed interest in developing a patch; it's just not something they've been able to do. More power to you, if you can figure out how to make the video playable without the decoder -- it's not an issue of Creative trying to 'scam' anyone... it's just a relic of a time when there was no standard for PC DVD, and each company had to create their own.
 
Which OS would be suggested to have the game running in optimal performance? I had a friend who tried running it in XP with the DXR2 decoder board and none of the video sequences were working...
 
I remember that beautiful day when I purchased the Creative Labs 2x DVD-ROM drive. Life has never been so sweet and DVDs used to be so much cooler. Odd that in the 6 or so years since games still aren't released on DVD. Just another indication of how ahead Wing Commander games have always been.
 
There were a few good DVD-ROM games... Wing IV of course, then Tex Murphy Overseer was released (not as good as the previous ones, but good) then Myst 2 or 3 were released on DVD continued with Journeyman Project 3 and finally the last one I saw was a version of Baulder's Gate on DVD to do away with the 5 CD's.....

Were there any others, worth mentioning or not?
 
There's Freespace on DVD. It's just Freespace on a DVD, though.

I do remember getting my first DVD drive to play Wing IV, though... I worked for two weeks at a summer camp in High School and then used all the money for a Creative DXR2. Even my mom, a certified technophobe, was impressed enough with the video (on StarShip Troopers!) to go out and buy a set top player.
 
Hrm. Now that I actually possess a good disassembler, I guess I ought to try to see what functions it calls and implements...
 
Ok, the videos play using 3rd party tools like PowerDVD.....but within the game it requires the hardware decoder. But I remember LOAF mentioning that the intro could work without the hardware, within the game, but the next video won't work.

Have any of you tried this, remove the decoder, load up PowerDVD then select file mode, insert the WC4 DVD disc and click the play button. I've had this demo DVD(from a mag) and it woked using this method because auto run would screw it up.

I dunno if it works, but some of you could give it a shot!
 
We could . . . if some of us had the damned dvd. . . or, in my case, if we had a dvd rom drive to begin with.
 
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