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."

Comments

Wine?

[Ynot_82]

I haven't read TFA yet
but wouldn't this have been a prime use-case for Wine on Windows?

Re:Wine?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Funny you should mention that..." I blew this morning trying to get some old PS2 hacking apps running on Wine. In the end I just installed w98 on a spare box. Wine is classic YMMV. It's a good, worthy project, but man, you just can't _count_ that's it's going to deal with even small old VB6 apps ahead of time. Use restraint for recommending it unless you've done exactly what's being discussed.

Re:Wine?

[CarpetShark]

For a lot of API calls, you could probably build some automated tool that analyses running programs on windows, recording calls in/out of programs/apps, their arguments, results, and what ideal results would be/are. From that, testing against wine builds would be fairly straight forward.

Re:Or you could

[peppepz]

I think it's not a good idea to run software which was not designed to run on the version of the OS you're using. Besides using ddraw.dll, those games might also display funny behaviour which was not uncommon in those pre-NT, pre-UAC days, such as installing VxD device drivers, scribbling the registry and tossing DLLs all over the filesystem. A VM could spare you those worries.

See for example DOSBox: it lets you run old games with near-perfect results, and running them in DOSBox is much, much, much easier than getting them to work on a real DOS machine was, back in the days.

Re:I wonder about this

[Rogerborg]

Funny you should mention DX3. Microsoft actually removed some surface caps flags in the transition from DX3 to DX5, and silently flipped the orientation that .BMP files were loaded (i.e. loaded them 'right way up' rather than 'upside down' as they're stored in the file). I know that was like three ice ages ago in Dev Years, but it still hurts when I think about it.

I realise that TheFineSummary talks about Windows 7, but there's still a fair number of XP boxen out there, for which Direct2D isn't an option. That said, I'd guess (as the article is down) that it's more of an ideological position, or - given that it's clearly a hobby project - just what the author is familiar with, or enjoys using. Given that we're talking about playing games here, I'd go with the latter explanation.

I do intend to RTFA when it recovers, since I find replacing/subverting dlls quite fun. I kludged up some code a while back to create a shim dll that can be used as the basis for selectively replacing functions in dlls, while calling through to the 'real' one for the other functions, so you can easily hack some functionality without having to re-implement the whole thing.

Re:Who says DirectDraw is going away?

[Xest]

Indeed, in fact, this was precisely one of the problems DirectX was always designed to solve from the start, it was designed to provide a multimedia API that could both move with the times and retain backwards compatibility.

Issues with older games tend to come down to hardware specific optimisations, obsolete libraries such as Glide, or OS specific code.

For the most part, stuff written with Microsoft's officially provided Windows APIs even back to Windows 95 (and sometimes even further back than that) tends to still run. It's the stuff that doesn't use those APIs that often causes the problems.

For better or worse, backwards compatbility is one thing that Microsoft certainly does tend to get right most the time. It's just that companies often ignore backwards compatibility when building new apps and just build for the now. Sometimes this is excused, i.e. game companies doing low level optimisations to improve performance, other times it's some MBA falling hook line and sinker for the sales pitch of some fly by night company providing an obscure set of code libraries and mandating all his developers use it.

I still have apps I wrote in C using the raw Win32 API back in 1995/1996 that work absolutely fine to this day.

Chances are if a game doesn't run, DirectX version is the least of it's troubles.

Re:I wonder about this

[xded]

I kludged up some code a while back to create a shim dll that can be used as the basis for selectively replacing functions in dlls...

A slightly more sophisticated solution would've been Detours.

Or, if you didn't feel like coding, WinAPIOverride32.

Re:Oh stop

[cbiltcliffe]

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.

I agree with this completely. I've recently been playing a fair amount of STALKER -Shadow of Chernobyl, and -Clear Sky lately.

The realism of the gameplay is partly due to realism in graphics and sound. Although at the same time, the world you are in is so open, and you are free to explore as you want/need to.
You are, after all, in a real place that actually exists. If you've seen pictures of the area around Chernobyl since the accident, then you'll recognize a lot of places as you play through the game. You'll be walking around, stop to chat to someone, hear a dog bark in the distance, a crack of thunder and it will start raining...then a radioactive mutant will be trying to rip your head off.

Many FPS games guide - or force - you to the next objective, so you don't have the opportunity to look around, find interesting places, and interact with many different characters in the game world.
This game is completely different. You can spend days walking, exploring, collecting goodies, not do a single mission, and it doesn't leave you thinking "I've not progressed any in this game."

I guess what I'm getting at is, good graphics and sound can certainly enhance a good game. But at the same time, no matter how good the graphics are, a crappy game is still going to be crappy.