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Breathing New Life Into Old DirectDraw Games
An anonymous reader writes "I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for Windows, but they use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll using OpenGL to output the games' graphics. I wrote an article describing the process and all the fun workarounds I had to come up with, and released all related source code for others to hack on."
Yes, DirectDraw still exists on Windows 7, ddraw.dll is still there, and the headers are still a part of the Windows SDK and DirectX SDK. The problem is that graphics card vendors no longer care to test that their drivers work properly with DirectDraw, so it's really hit or miss if you get support.
What is learned by simply booting up a VM and loading a game? In the story submission he specifically mentioned "all the fun workarounds" that he had to come up with get everything to work on a modern system. Don't you think doing a cleanroom reimplementing a subsystem like DirectDraw presents a great learning experience?
No, I wouldn't have done this if you had payed me; I have my own interests and passions. I'm not at all interested in graphics programming or for that matter video games, though, apparently someone is and I think it's great that he saw a problem and decided to attempt to find a solution for it.
This is what being a geek is all about. Bravo.
It's only already done if the only ddraw game you want to play is Wing Commander 1-4 (Windows versions). And only with conventional monitor setups and only if you never want to capture the window content, due to the kludges involved. And if you can stand the known bugs he mentioned, eg. the blinking screen effect described in Wing Commander 4.
So basically, it's only already done if you want a suboptimal experience. But you were just talking about how you wanted an optimal solution, and how a solution that basically works better than this is "never" the optimal solution. To be fair, it sounds like 1-3 work pretty well, but for 4 you have to put up with some crap. And any other ddraw game is unlikely to work all that well.
This is a fun an interesting reverse engineering project. Stop being such a prick about it.
Automated testing of all the applications is pretty much a nonstarter. However, automated regression testing to make sure function calls with the same arguments in the same context don't give different results just because you debugged a different set of arguments or in a different environment are easy to do with a proper test harness. The hard part is mapping the applications to test cases, but that's not impossible, just time consuming and somewhat difficult.
The "Back in the day things were so much better," stuff gets annoying no matter what it is about and games are no exception. Were there good games back in the day? Sure were. Guess what? There were also bad ones, you just don't remember them as well. This is in part because our memory tends to deliberately filter out bad experience, but mainly because good games you played a ton, bad games got set aside.
Know what else? There are good games now. The modern graphics and so on have not stopped people form being able to make good games.
Also I don't like this elitist "purist" thing that people pretend to of "Oh I don't even like the graphics, I just want good gameplay." Guess what? The graphics and sound can well be a part of that. When games are visually appealing it can add to the immersivness. It is easier to lose yourself in a convincing world.
So stop getting all "Get off my lawn," about games. There are great old games and you can still enjoy them with the help of emulators. However don't hate on new games just because they look better. That is not a bad thing, it is a good thing.