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

heads up for combat soldiers' family and friends:

[ChipMonk]

In 1998, I bought a second-hand Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom for US$10. The gameplay and graphics quality were fantastic, and I was particularly impressed with the producers' investment in the game.

But there was one thing I couldn't get past: the warzone aspect. At the time, a dear friend of mine was in the Bosnia combat zone, and every time I tried to play WC4, I couldn't help but think about her and what she was experiencing. I wanted to enjoy WC4, honestly, but after about 5 minutes I just couldn't, knowing that my friend was in mortal danger for real. It got to the point that I ejected the CD, wrote off the $10 as a bad investment, and flung it across the room.

Re:Or you could

[hapalibashi]

Amen