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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."
and we didn't need gimmicks like motion controllers, photo-realistic graphics and high framerates to enjoy them.
I haven't read TFA yet
but wouldn't this have been a prime use-case for Wine on Windows?
My own DirectDraw apps from 1996 work great in Windows 7. The API is deprecated in the sense that Microsoft no longer recommends using it, and who knows if they're still even shipping ddraw.h, for that matter. But as a COM component, runtime support for IDirectDraw isn't any more endangered than CreateWindow().
But to run Wing Commander on modern hardware, it doesn't need to be optimal. 80/20 rule dude.
In the Beginning
It all started about a month ago, when one friend of mine had decided to follow his dreams and was moving to the states, and he had to get rid of a lot of stuff. Among his discard pile was a bunch of Wing Commander games, which I bought off him, figuring they might be interesting research material, as I'm planning on a game with similar game play structure (as in story combined with game play, not a 3d space shooter).
So, I found myself in the possession of Wing Commanders 1, 2, 3 and 4, all Windows versions - the Kilrathi Saga and WC4CD to be specific. I installed the first and tried it out. My Win7 switched to 256 colors at a 640x480 resolution, but the game ran.. with completely wrong palette.
Bugged by this I played with the compatibility options, and got the game to almost work well, with the palette going wrong at some points.. so the game was sort of playable, but I hated the fact that Windows changed to 256 colors and I couldn't see my mailbox properly in the other screen, etc.
I also tried WC2 and WC3, and they had similar - or worse - problems. I even learned the steps to get WC3 to work properly:
1. Find the WC3W.EXE executable, turn on (basically) all the compatibility options.
2. Start task manager.
3. Find and kill all instances of explorer.exe. Your desktop will disappear, along with the task bar.
4. Using task manager, launch WC3W.EXE
Naturally the screen resolution and color mode will be 640x480 and 256 colors, but if you've bent backwards that much, you probably don't care all that much.
Seeing that the games use DirectDraw, I decided to roll my own.
Doing the Homework
The first step is always to look for prior art. Maybe someone had written a new ddraw.dll already, and I could just use it. As it happens, lots of people have, but nothing that's useful for me. Most of the ddraw.dll hacks are actually wrappers - that get between the game and the real ddraw.dll, change something subtle, but let the real ddraw.dll do the heavy lifting.
The point of these hacks is to fix small problems, like games that ignore surface pitch, require cleared surfaces or some such. In one case I found a forum thread claiming that deleting ddraw.dll from the game's directory fixes something, so in this case it's a hack gone wrong.
After further searching I found a project which actually released sources, with a liberal license even. It was a wrapper project (meaning, again, that they just call the real ddraw.dll), only supported DirectDraw7 and only very small parts of it, but it showed me how to get going.
I also dug up old DirectX SDK:s from my personal CD stack, as Microsoft has helpfully nuked all old DirectDraw documentation off the online MSDN. Thanks, dudes.
Wing Commander 1
Wing Commander 1 for Windows uses DirectDraw2. There's no real reason it couldn't just use DirectDraw1, considering that all it does is locking the front buffer and dumping a frame to it, along with some palette manipulation.
Or well, that's not the whole truth. If the game can set a 320x200 mode, it does what I described above. If this fails, it tries to set up 640x400, and after that fails, 640x480. In the two higher resolution modes, the game allocates a software 320x200 buffer, and uses blt() to scale it up 2x, meaning that in 640x480 mode, black bars are introduced to the top and the bottom, and the aspect ratio is wrong.
When playing WC1 it astonishes me just how much love has gone into the it when compared to later games. The later ones may be better in some ways, but the polish that can be experienced in WC1 is gone.
Anyway, I started by writing a wrapper that just dumps out log about what calls are made with what parameters, and then went on to implement a hack dll that only implements those calls.
The hack dll resizes the application's window to desktop resolution, sets up an OpenGL context, uploads
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.
I try to enjoy parties, but every time I can't help but feel bad for all those poor Indians who died in 1812 during the Boston Tea Party.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Not 100% accurate. Windows 7 includes direct-x 9 itself (there's not much to it), but not all the different d3dX9_??.dll extension files. Those are what you have to install.
The DX web setup will bring you up to date with all direct-x 9 onwards extension files, regardless of whether you're running XP or 7, x86 or x64, Home or Ultimate (just look at the comprehensive supported OSs list!).
Any older versions of DX are supported, you shouldn't need to install anything for them.
Here's a coral cache link that works just fine
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.
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.
But does the 80% go to the rear shields, or the front?