Breath of Fire 4 - Windows 7
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Hello everyone
I've been trying to run Breath of Fire 4 but without success. Apparently it worked on older GPU drivers and on Windows XP. The game goes to a white screen right from the start, sound is ok but not the video. It uses DirectX 7 as far as I know. I've been messing with the huge number of options, while reading the manual, but still... Using DxWnd I run into the error "CreateSurface flipping surface error". If anyone is able to help me I would be really appreciated =x there are lots of topics on how to run this game on modern PCs(but without solution) so it would be really helpful!
Thanks
Last edit: fake 2014-11-24
I could be wrong, but I remember I run this game with DxWnd in some past experiment. Anyway, have faith (and some patience) ...
Really? Oh, you should have kept the settings...
I found the solution to the problem "CreateSurface flipping surface error". On DirectX Emulation change to either Primary Buffer or Locked Surface. Primary Surface was the issue I guess. But now the problem is "BF4.exe has stopped working" =|
Good. btw, latest v2.02.99 release could fix the problem with "CreateSurface flipping surface error". It could be interesting to try.
Apart from this, if you've got a crash problem, flags that could help are in the compatibility section, the following ones:
o Replace priviliged opcodes
o Handle exceptions
I'm sorry that for a couple of days I won't be able to try the game by myself. If you want to experiment these flags in the meanwhile... Another thing you could do is enabling logs (check the first 4 flags top to bottom in the Logs tab, plus the "Debug"option) and post the logfile when the problem occours. Be aware that logfiles could be very big, so don't fool around in the game and compress it!
bye
GHO
A small progress: I found and fixed a bug that crashed the game at the very beginning. Now you can get as far as the character selection, then the game crashes because of anothr problem. But at least you can see the intro movie ....
I was already using v2.02.99... Wow, great news =p hmmm I tried the 2 flags u mentioned with the 2 option on the Emulation(6 tries) but I couldn't do that =| I will try the debugging option later this evening
You should use this patched version to pass the intro movie.
I tested several configurations, but apparently the game doesn't like having ddraw hooked. I tried to track the problem with OllyDBG, but the crash corrupts the debugger data so that it's impossibile to understand what really happened. The hunt continues ....
Last edit: gho 2014-11-25
I don't know if I'm doing it right but that .dll doesn't change a thing =X I'm using the latest version, v2.02.99. I substituted the old .dll by that one. I experimented the flags you mentioned but nothing worked. What am I doing wrong? Or just wrong settings? Everything is default except DirectX -> Emulation and Compat -> Tweaks. Thanks
Yesterday I tried the game on my second PC, with a slightly better video card, and I got the sad suprise that nothing worked, starting from the autorun.exe that should configure the video card.
I strongly suspect that there might be a memory overflow problem, like available memory greater than MAXINT value. Unfortunately now I'm tied to the first pc, so I can't verify the theory. But in this situation I got a "Flip error" dialog box sort of thing, so maybe this is the problem that hurts you.
I'll try a fix tonight, but in theory you could fix it by setting the "Limit available resources"compatibility flag.
The autorun problem seem detectable by the fact that the video card / resolution fields (in the Screen Setup function) are not proposing the correct values: is this happening on your PC as well? The screenshot shows what happens on the "good" pc where BoF4 partially works.
I can run autorun.exe with no problems, although I can't choose any resolution.
These are the scenarios I got so far:
- if I run the game without DxWnd I get a white screen. I have sound but not video. If I press 2 times Enter the screen goes black, and I'm pretty sure I'm on character creation at that time.
- if I run the game with DxWnd with default settings I get the error "CreateSurface flipping surface error" and the log "default.log" on the attachments.
- if I run the game with DxWnd with default settings but with either "Primary Buffer" or "Locked Surface" selected it "stops working" right away. Log "primarybuffer". I can select the flags "Replace privileged opcodes", "Handle Exceptions" and "Limit available resources" but apparently they change nothing. The only one that has an impact is "Handle Exceptions", instead of having the message that the game is not working, it simply exits.
- if I run the game with DxWnd with default settings, with "Primary Buffer" and "DirectX8" selected I get the white screen again! It's like running it without DxWnd. Log for this one is "primary_directx8". I pressed 2 times enter on that log until the screen went black, then I exited.
You can use BOF4w to run the game in Windowed Mode, while waiting gho seek out something new. It worked for me before: http://shimaflarex.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/bof4w-released/
Last edit: Anonymous 2014-11-26
I still get the white screen =S Can you play the game full screen without that BOF4w program? I know it's a GPU driver's issue, with the new ones. By "new" I mean 3 years or so =p I installed the oldest driver for my GPU/SO on the weekend but didn't change a thing.
Last edit: fake 2014-11-26
Just found this articles:
http://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2014/08/06/breath-of-fire-iv/
You will see that the white screen is a very common problem of BOF4 when running on Windows 7/8. And sadly, no workarounds unless you consider gone back to Windows XP..
But do not despair, we have a mighty Gho that have the ability to turn the impossible into possible. Let's wait and see..
Just found this articles:
http://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2014/08/06/breath-of-fire-iv/
You will see that the white screen is a very common problem of BOF4 when running on Windows 7/8. And sadly, no workarounds unless you consider gone back to Windows XP..
But do not despair, we have a mighty Gho that have the ability to turn the impossible into possible. Let's wait and see..
Just found this articles:
http://www.play-old-pc-games.com/2014/08/06/breath-of-fire-iv/
You will see that the white screen is a very common problem of BOF4 when running on Windows 7/8. And sadly, no workarounds unless you consider gone back to Windows XP.
But do not despair, we have a mighty Gho that have the ability to turn the impossible into possible. Let's wait and see..
Last edit: Anonymous 2014-11-26
The situation is puzzling, and I start to suspect that this game has some serious problem of its own....
On my "good" PC I discovered that turning some logging feature off the game runs. I thought of a buggy log string, but when I reached the offending code (the one that commented out don't cause the problem ...) there was nothing posibly harmful. Also, commenting this single log line the problem doesn't disappear, but shifts somewhere else. Could it be that the logging delays the thread execution and triggers a buggy code somewhere else? Who knows....
But turning the log off on this pc let you play the game perfectly (see the shots) and also time stretching and texture dump are working!
The situation is quite different on my "bad" pc: here I get the same situation as fake (there is no resolution list to chose from) and when you run the game you get the "CreateSurface flipping surface error" message. Looking at the logs, it is quite clear that in this case the autorun selects a screen size 0x0 and 0BPP color depth, and ddraw doesn't like it! It even tried to copy the "good" bof4.cfg on top of the "bad" one, but nothing happened. I wonder if the resolution and color data are quite there....
In any case, both pc hold Win7, so I suppose this situation holds for Win8 as well.
Stay tuned ....
Last edit: gho 2014-11-26
It is possible to run the game just fine with integrated GPU I think. My laptop actually has one, but it is disabled by my BIOS and I would need to unlock the BIOS -.- dam Toshiba...
Using a dedicated GPU, I've read somewhere of a person who was able to solve the problem by installing an old GPU driver. Sadly for Windows 7 the oldest driver is not good enough.
That explains why we don't have video!
I sure will =x
I should find what's wrong with the video card detection. After all, the program should use ddraw methods to get the information, and DxWnd should be able to cheat it and provide digestible data.
How strange! In the "Limit available resources" I set the maximum memory to 0x7FFFF000 (approx. 2GBytes), but the BoF4 card detection works only if the available memory is less than 0x7F000000 (that is only 16Mbytes less...).
Updating the code with this tiny modification, makes the game work also an my PC and, hopefully, on yours!
The change will be included in next DxWnd release, but for now grab this archive with a patched DxWnd version, the BoF4 exported file (the only important thing is having set the "Limit available resources" flag on) and also an updated mp.dll that should provide fast multiprocessor bilinear filtering, if you like this feature.
Be aware that the game seems to have a few bugs that don't allow to set DxWnd logging (there's no real offending log, but if you enable log in a particular screen transition the game crashes....) and I saw that is some cases it seem to hang during combats. My advice is to leave logging turned off and to save often!
Please, let me know how it worked for you.
It's perfect!!! It worked like a charm =p I already played for like an hour with no issues at all =X I deactivated logs and had to change emulation to Primary Buffer. And that's it! I still don't believe you made it xD There are lots of people claiming the "white screen" issue... Hopefully they will check this forum. Thank you so much!
P.S.: I was about to post on that blog but you were faster =X
You can post to the blog as well and get the share of credit you deserve: after all, it's you that pointed this game out to me and supported me until we got a fix.
BTW this is a perfect game to grab textures and make hacks: I'm settling a few things about the texture dump & replace mechanism (there are a few details not fully working) and then anyone will be in the position to hack and inject his favourite graphic!
Would make this game even more perfect if we could use the "hack" texture feature. I could single handidly make this the ultimate version... but it crashes on load everytime I select it.
Did you check the "Flip emulation" flag? It turned out to be necessary on latest release ...
Trying to run BoF IV on Win 10. I'm getting the following:
Or:
Game runs fine on its own, but I'd like to play it in windowed mode. Any input?
Last edit: Quadragon 2015-10-16
If I remember correctly, a similar problem occurred some time ago and was caused by an incomplete installation of ddraw libraries on Win10. By default, Win10 comes with support for recent d3d releases (DirectX8, 9 I believe....) while the compatibility to previous releases requires installation of some extra.
Unfortunately, my PC has Win7, so I can't test what I'm saying. Maybe some other user can confirm or correct what I'm saying.