Weird colors are back: none of the solutions work anymore

[Wastrel]

Hi, I unfortunately have a very new and strange problem, I hope you can give me some suggestions about what to do, I gave up after days of searching for solutions.

If you know what the issue is with older Win9x games using Directraw, please skip this introduction. So I like playing with classic PC games, and I usually successfully manage to make my games compatible with Windows 7, even those written for the infamous Windows 95. There are some games which are impossible to revive (Lunicus, Gulf War: Operation Desert Hammer and Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire for example), but 99% of games work. One of the common and big problems with these games was their dependence from Directdraw, which was discontinued with Directx8 but Windows 7 uses parts of the DD layer for Aero as I know. The Windows 7 version of Directdraw was somewhat modified for Windows 7, which causes a very serious compatibility issue with older games. DD messes up the color palette of 8 bit-colour games, and produces very LSD-ish colours, which makes these games virtually unplayable, even though they are running very well despite this flaw. The solution for this problem was fairly simple: If you kill explorer.exe and launch the game a few seconds later, the color problem will disappear. I solved the problem with this method all the time, and it worked... so far.

I don't know what happened, but killing explorer.exe doesn't solve the problem anymore. To make things worse, all of the older Directdraw games produce ONLY these purple-rainbow colors, but there were some games which only had minor color palette flaws like Starcraft, Command & Conquer and KKND. All of these games are now purple and cyan as well. I didn't install and remove any programs in my system, except for doing an update on my video card drivers (from april 2013 WHQL to december 2013 WHQL), and removing my antivirus software (reinstalling it didn't solve the problem). I have an Ati Radeon HD 5650M.

Solutions I tried and didn't work
- Killing explorer exe; killing task manager as well: no longer works
- Using automation applications which kill explorer.exe and set some compatibility modes automatically when launching an old game
- Setting all possible compatibility options and trying to run the games in Administrator mode
- Using DXWND (produces the weird colors even there & games are running extremely slowly)
- Trying to edit DDraw compatibility mode in registry after this tutorial: http://cnc-comm.com/community/index.php?topic=711.0

Solutions that are only half-solutions:
- Using DDHACK: Only works with Astrorock, WarcraftII: Battle.net Edition and Starcraft, but not with Juggernaut Corps, KKND, Speedboat attack and all the other games.
- Using VM: Virtualbox has good graphics drivers for Windows 9x but is extremely slow, the only game I can play through virtualbox with decent speed is Dune 2000 (Which only requires VM for install). VMWare Workstation lacks acceptable drivers for Win9x gaming, and a lot of games don't work with it like Dune2000, Battle Commander or Speedboat Attack.

When I was digging under the most hellish places of the internet, I have found conjectures about the shitty Ati drivers causing many troubles for gamers who want to play with early 3D-accelerated games. Ati (now AMD) releases WHQL drivers every second month, and every newer versions causes problems for some players with certain games or does the exact opposite: makes games compatible which weren't playable with a previous version. I have experienced the unreliability of ATI drivers too: With the stock VAIO driver (which wasn't updated since early 2010), none of the newer games work (starting with Brink and Rage), Blacksite only gives a black screen and Moho (a classic fighting / racing game) crashes on the start. But the beta drivers released for RAGE magically let me play with both Blacksite and MOHO. Another newer version (created for MoH: Warfighter after it being unplayable with the previous drivers) retained the compatibility with Blacksite but MOHO started to crash again.

The only possible solution I didn't try yet is reverting the driver version to an older one. But one question remains: what to do if installing an older driver doesn't solve my problem? Can you offer me other possible solutions, which I didn't try yet?

I'm waiting for your advices. Thank you in advance.

[AD]

FWIW, DDraw compatibility mode may fail in cases when people blindly copy exe signature from examples. This is due to binary difference in various versions / localizations of a game.

[hfric]

the only solution is . buy yourself a older laptop for dedicated dos/win98 gaming

then using your new laptop

[Wastrel]

If I had money and most importantly space, I would buy a retro machine with a PII CPU and a 3DFX card. But in my case this is unfortunately not a possible solution, as I currently lack of any space in my room. Everything should work as they did previously (and mostly without any emulation). My only option is to try removing the newer WHQL driver and installing an older one, but I wanted to get rid of this option as I play with both the newest and classic games, and the newest ones often require an updated driver.

The only thing I don't know is why this issue appeared again and why wasn't it fixed by Microsoft. This is a very well known and documented problem with old 2D Directx games, the DDraw library is only a few hundred kbs long (so not a huge wall of text like .NET runtimes), and many games are still being sold and supported (Starcraft and many GOG games for example) while no one knows a perfect solution for this problem.

[hfric]

just tested something odd ... Daum 2014 Dosbox version that has now a working Direct 3d with pixel shader 3.0 ... wow http://ykhwong.x-y.net

its now compatible with win 3.11 ... win 98 second edition and win 95 ... even Win Me / 2K ... just tested Half-life on it ... it worked flawless

[Wastrel]

Wow, if it's true, that's what I need! Thank you for the info!

[hfric]

Wow, if it's true, that's what I need! Thank you for the info!

This build is an enhanced SVN build which incorporates unofficial features and fixes that are not officially part of DOSBox.

Included patches
Direct3D with pixelshaders, OpenglHQ, Innovation, Glide, zip/7z mount, Beep, NE2000 Ethernet, Graphical user interface (menu),
Save/Load states, Vertical sync, CPU flags optimization, Various DOS commands (PROMPT VOL, LABEL, MOUSE, etc) and
CONFIG.SYS commands (DEVICE, BUFFERS, FILES, etc), Continuous turbo key, Core-switch key, Show details (from menu bar),
Nice DOSBox icon, Font patch (cp437), MAKEIMG command, INTRO, Ctrl-break patch, DBCS support patch, Automatic mount,
Printer output, MT-32 emulation (MUNT), MP3CUE, Overscan border, Stereo-swap, SDL_Resize, Internal 3dfx voodoo chip emulation,
Amstrad & PS/1 sound emulation, Fluidsynth soundfont support, Timidity++ backend support, CGA w/ Monochrome Monitor Support,
Improve PC Speaker emulation accuracy patch, Pentium MMX, Dongle support, Secondary display, DOSBox-X branch,
File-locking support patch, xBRZ scaler, etc.

heck even Save States in games that did not have save !!! and Timidity++ support from the get go just add Sound fonts and you will have sound like this in games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cZfvr8d3wo
or here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4oWg-Hos-s

[Wastrel]

I did some trial and error methods with Virtual Win9x drives, Directdraw wrappers and graphics drivers. Here are my experiences:

- I have downloaded another directdraw color fix (I don't remember its name), but it didn't fix the colors.
- I tried to run apps in DXWND in full screen. While this solved the heavy performance problems with running the games in a window, it doesn't fix the color corruption either.
- I have tried installing a WIN98 SE in the Dosbox build hfric suggested following a Tutorial on the vogons website. While the main components of the OS were installed successfully, the system crashed right after trying to first run the OS (while it installed plug & play drivers). This issue seems to be unresolvable with my current knowledge. I also don't have a clue about how to mount a CD-ROM image which can be accessed by this virtual WIN98 without having to copy the CD-images to the virtual HD I created and installing a virtual drive inside WIN98.

AND NOW THE WORKING SOLUTION: My presumption about the AMD driver update causing the problem was right. But instead of uninstalling the new driver and downgrading to an older one (thus destroying the compatibility with the newest games like BF4), I installed the newest Beta driver (feb 2014). I have a laptop graphics card, but I accidentally installed the desktop drivers. The driver magically changed the theme of my Windows 7 (I had a Custom Hyperdesk theme before but now it's a Win9x-like theme with pink colors ), and it took about 20 minutes for the installer to change all the drivers. After the installation finished, I had a bad feeling about me successfully destroying all the games with having installed a bad type of driver. But when I tried to run some Win9X games with corrupted colors before, all of them are working now as they should! I don't even have to kill explorer.exe in the task manager to play! Now I have to test the newer games as well to see if the (otherwise incompatible) driver destroyed any compatibility with the newer games, but if everything works, I will keep this driver. I suggest all of you to install the newest BETA driver if you experience the same issue with your older games. BETA drivers are almost always better than the WHQL drivers as I experienced. In 2011, when RAGE didn't even launch with the existing drivers, I installed a BETA driver and it not only made RAGE compatible with my computer (despite the stock VAIO drivers are a mess and you cannot replace them with a standard ATI driver by default), but with a second update, it improved the game's speed to almost constant 60 FPS with 4X AA. When the WHQL version of that driver came out, the performance dropped back to the 40s zone.

Honestly, I'm not a fan of virtualization as most of the Virtual PC solutions lack the proper drivers or virtualization layers to provide full 3D (or, in case of VMWare, even 2D) support. Furthermore, I only saw a few games which I can't run natively with some tweaks on Win7-X64 to run perfectly in my Win98SE virtual machine. Most of the games I cannot run on Windows 7, doesn't work in a VM either (Two typical examples: Gulf War - crashes to the desktop immediately no matter what exe file I'm running in BOTH Win7 and Win98, and Marine Heavy gunner: Doesn't run on Windows 7 (exists to the desktop), but I can't run it on Win98 VM either because the lack of D3D support for Win9x in VMWare). Dosbox is an unbeatable tool for DOS emulation, but it is slow with the late 90s games (Build engine games don't run with acceptable speed on above 640x480 resolution), yet it's a necessary software since there is no other way to run 16 bit games on a 64 bit system. But I want to avoid playing Win98 games in an emulated environment as much as possible.