MW2 3DFX on Win7 x64?

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thecrankyhermit
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MW2 3DFX on Win7 x64?

Post by thecrankyhermit »

The 3DFX version of MW2 31CC is my favorite version of MW2, and it works fine for me in Windows XP SP3 32-bit by using MW2Hook, dgVoodoo, and Windows 95 compatibility mode.

However, Windows 7 64 is the future, so I'm trying to future-proof all my games by figuring out how to run them on a Win7 machine I borrowed. The DOS versions run fine in DOSBox, and Titanium Trilogy runs fine with Win95 compatibility mode. But MW2 3DFX is causing trouble.

The shell runs fine, in a window, but as soon as I enter a mission, it complains that it can't find DPLAY.DLL. I found a copy of this file, downloaded it, and put it in the game's directory. Now when I enter a mission, the 3D graphics display fine, but it runs at less than a frame per second. It's torture just to navigate the menu that lets you abort the mission.

I'm not sure what to try in the hopes of making it work. I've tried some other glide wrappers - OpenGLide and zeckensack's, and I've tried messing with dgVoodoo settings, but it made no difference, even when I changed settings that you'd expect to have some effect, like changing the resolution or forcing windowed mode.
thecrankyhermit
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Re: MW2 3DFX on Win7 x64?

Post by thecrankyhermit »

I just made an interesting discovery.

Turns out I was using dgVoodooSetup wrong. By default it configures glide2x.dll. But MW2 uses glide.dll. By deleting glide2x.dll, the setup will default to glide.dll. Now my settings actually do something.

And I found that if I force windowed mode, the game becomes playable! Frame rate kind of sucks, but not so much it can't be played.

However, that seems to be the only setting that solves the issue of it being unplayable. And windowed mode isn't ideal, thanks to it being pretty small. Bumping up the resolution doesn't help - the window's top-left corner is anchored in place, so a larger resolution makes the window run off the bottom of the screen.

So I guess now, I want to find out why fullscreen locks up the way it does, when windowed runs fine (in comparison), and if there's a way to make fullscreen work.
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macflav
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Re: MW2 3DFX on Win7 x64?

Post by macflav »

I couldn't find a way to force windowed mode. It would solve the "stretched screen" problem (I hate it when images get distorted). Is it possible? (I'm using Vista)
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LordNova2
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Re: MW2 3DFX on Win7 x64?

Post by LordNova2 »

I am not sure which video-card hardware your using (ATI, or nVidia), but you should be able to go into the control panel for your video card drivers and tell it to let the drivers/software and tell it to use scaling with a 'fixed-aspect ratio'.
EG my monitor is 1920x1200 max resolution, if I just use scaling it will stretch a 1600x1200 image out to fit the entire screen, but if you enable the fixed-aspect ratio it will force it to be displayed on the monitor as a true 1600x1200 image.

However since we are trying to use some really old software that has to have some 3rd-party application emulate specific hardware and drivers to get it functioning on our newer hardware and O/Ss, this might be the cause to some of the issues too.
However playing MW2 in 'window mode' dose help to fix allot of known issues (even smoothes out frame rates for me). And why that should even make a difference in how DosBox emulates the hardware and handles the software I do not know.
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macflav
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Re: MW2 3DFX on Win7 x64?

Post by macflav »

My video card is the ATI mobility X-2300. Unfortunately, Catalyst Control Center (aka CCC) won't work with it (I've tried ATI Mobility Modder and everything). Mobility support was added to the latest version of Catalyst (10.3), but apparently my video card is too old -- thus not supported. :x Therefore, I can't get access to anything really besides the basic Windows video settings.

I figured out a great way to play MW2 DOS fullscreen without stretching. I set the DOSBox resolution to my native res -- 1280 x 800 (as you probably know you have to edit "dosbox-0.73.conf"), and MW2 "Combat Variables" to 1024 x 768. The game menus and movies show up as a small square in the center of the screen (640 x 480), but the in-game visual looks perfect (a "big square" centered).

This topic, however, is about the 3D accelerated version of MW2 for Win95. There's no question that the frame rate is way better in this version, for obvious reasons -- although I can't get over the fact that the highest resolution available in the previous DOS version is better than the 3Dfx one (640 x 480). I couldn't find a way to play it preserving the 4:3 aspect ratio though. Your CCC tweaking suggestion would be perfect -- if only I could get it to work here. From thecrankyhermit's posts, it appears that he was successful forcing windowed mode. I've tried everything I can think of -- even tried a software called DXWnd. No luck getting this version (Titanium) to run windowed.

If anyone knows how to do it, I would appreciate it if they were kind enough to share it...
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