Topic about mixed new supported games (you'll see that they are NOT new games, but on the contrary quite old glories!).
First one: you you have children, you should love this one: Payuta and the Ice God
Use the attached export, I had to tweak several flags about the palette handling on GDI, but it should work almost ok (currently, I just have one of the four mini-games that is not working), maybe with some crackled sound.
Another one: Rampage World Tour.
This one still requires some work to eliminate a few strange tweaks to make it running, I hope I will be able to post a valid export sooner or later. The game is promising, it has CD music that works perfectly emulated by DxWnd.
Rampage W.T. is a case stranger than expected.
I installed it from a CD image and WineVDM to run the 16bit installer. Then I extracted the audio tracks and moved to the Music folder. Finally, I had to set reduced color mode 16bit to rampagew.exe.
The game runs (often, not always!) with the attached configuration. Beware: this way the game believes to be running in window mode, but if you type Alt-Enter to switch to fullscreen mode then the game crashes!
But what puzzles me is the fact that the game can run without reduced color mode and a different configuration, but it crashes quite more often (sometimes with puzzling messages like error code 0) and it is impossible to debug with OllyDBG because when the debugger is attached the game crashes before.
I should be wary of old small games: this "Loony Labyrinth Pinball" (p.s. visit MyAbandonware) seemed a simple challenge, but ...
First the installer didn't work. I run it using WinveVDM, perfect tool for 16 bit installers.
But the installer didn't go to the end: at the last step it claimed that a file was missing and I had to quit. As a result, I got all game files, but the installer didn't set the registry entries.
So, the game was almost working, but I had to guess all necessary registry values and put them inside the fake registry. The game uses an old and forgotten function RegSetValueA (not to be confused with the modern and used version RegSetValueExA) so in order to get the necessary logs I also had to add a wrapper to DxWnd to dump the values.
At last, I got the game working! Not all registry values are set properly, but if anyone wants to complete the job, he is welcome! In my fake registry settings the game is registered (by "gho", of course!) and uses the following keys:
Z - left flipper
M - right flipper
SHIFT - plunger
SPACE - nudge
The gameplay is nothing unexpected (it's a pinball, what else?) but the game could be an interesting gym for experiments with legacy audio (wav, midi and all this stuff ..).
In addition, the game comes with two different versions, almost identical. I checked the IAT, and the only difference seems to be the usage of an extra call in user32.dll. What for???
Enjoy.
Always on the pinball cathegory but this time a more recent one: "SlamIt Pinball Big Score" is a 2009 game that mixes D3D9 and OpenGL. Furtunately, this time the mix is not explosive like sometimes happens and the game is a beauty in high resolution and scalable window.
Thank you very much.
Analyzing the registry dump I see that my configuration files don't miss that much, but I also see that I made some confusion between the concept of registry subkey and field. The practical effect is that a file like this can't be cut & pasted in the fake registry panel.
I make an example: DxWnd logs shows this error:
Obviously, regedit is correct, DxWnd is wrong. DxWnd treats the subkey as if it was a field.
This would require some adjustement in DxWnd logic, but I think that the possibility to import a regedit dump file will be very useful. Well, next release, maybe.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Something new and (hopefully) easy: Cycling Manager 4, ready to run with default settings.
In a screenshot you can see an evident clipping of the cyclist, but I checked: the game in native mode behaves the same.
I'm still having trouble with exporting "Loony Labyrinth Pinball (C). Dxw" (and S) on Win7.
With this export, only 1 intro image (Little Wing) with the wrong color palette will be displayed.
If I enable "Initial virtual color setting" - 8 BPP I can see all 3 intro images, but the color palette is wrong. The color palette directly in the game is fine. The situation with (S) is different. The color palette is fine, but the intro image Little Wing is distorted. If I enable "Initial virtual color setting" - 8 BPP I can see all 3 intro images in the correct color palette, but the first two are distorted.
I know this is not a fundamental problem, but it suggests that something is wrong.
Some idea?
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Please, remind me about this when this covid19 stuff will be over. At the moment, my Win7 computer is locked into an unreacheable office and I'm not going to volunteer to get back to my desk. I'm working from home, but I'm surrounded by Win10 computers only!
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
A new entry, weird enough to deserve some mention: "Bone Out from Boneville" is a dx8 adventure game that curiously requires "Hot patch" flag to start, otherwise it hangs DxWnd and makes it necessary to kill DxWnd.exe since the game is not listed in the processes list.
That's fine, but curious: the Hot Patch flag usually gives troubles when you set it, not when it's unset!
Uhmm... there's something weird, the game doesn't scale the size correctly, the image is bound in the initial 800x600 rectangle .... weird. There's more to investigate.
i remember owning ths game, at one point, back when telltale games had thier website running, and i was buying their games, via the wesbite, and not steam (the early days of the walking dead video game, which is what telltale games were most famous for). There was also a sequel to this game, it was called "The Great Cow Race", so you may want to try and find out where to grab this too.
From what i remember, these games always ran in windowed mode, it had fullscreen mode option built-in, it would play the game in its correct aspect ratio at fullscreen. 4:3.
also both games, were available on steam, at some point, but have now been removed from sales, there are still steam store pages, available for them , but not buyable ( i think they got de-listed from steam, when telltale games shut down, in the last year or so).
EDIT: i have just found out, i still have these games, in my steam games list, and they are still downloadbale and playable (must have bought them, around a certain time period), didn't even know i had them. So, i could send you the contents, of one of them... I think the great cow race was only around 250mbish.
Even better, both games, run without steam.
Last edit: jds45782 2020-04-17
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Unfortunately, the cow race seems to depend on Steam somehow: trying to run it without produces a "Steam error". It's not the typical Steam protection error (the game doesn't even link Steam libraries), the error code 2:0000065558 doesn't tell much (2 could be a file-not-found errorcode or whatever, 65558 could be a -24 in some unsigned short format).
Even worse, the DxWnd log doesn't show any attempt to open a file, check a device or access a registry key.
At a better glance, the game tries to load a missing (here) Steam.dll. The library is searched in the game folder and, in case of error, in any father folder going upward up to the root drive C:. Adding a fake Steam.dll in the game folder changes the error code, that means that this is the cause.
Maybe you have a Steam.dll somewhere.
i shut down the steam client software, checked if no steam references were running in the background. Started up the games exe, and yes, by joe, it accesses steam ,and forces steam to execute.
The Steam.dll file, accessed by the game, seems to be the one in the root folder. where steam is installed, for me its - D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam
for me, if i added a Steam.dll file to the game folder, if Steam is running in the background(bare in mind the renamed Steam.dll file is still there), the game runs successfully, with steam shut down, game fails to run but no errors show.
Last edit: jds45782 2020-04-18
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
The protection seems to be tricky (would you think otherwise?). Steam.dll is not in the game folder, it is not statically linked to the game (like stram_api.dll) and if you provide a fake dll the protection ticks even before trying to load any named function call. Probably it's something in the dll DLLMain call that is invoked automatically at the dll loading. And almost for sure the dll talks to the game and Steam in some cyphered way. Clever.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
yes, so unless you have a version of the steam client software installed, and running, there's no way of running the game, hence steam DRM. A hacker would sink thier teeth into this.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Well, this particular protection is cracked almost daily I think (by looking at the many uploads on various sites). Not sure if anyone currently busy with this stuff is reading this thread though. I also hope no one will be bothered that it gets disscussed here in the first place.
(edit)
By the way, there's this application that emulates the Client called SmartSteamEmu. I don't know how useful it could be in this case, since I didn't have any actual use for it yet.
Please have a careful look at text information included or otherwise check it in general. I have limited knowledge as to how it can be implemented.
@huh: good hint. I saw it before, but I was deceived by the size, too similar to the size of the game demo. This one must be Telltale's original version. Anyway, I don't think this is abandonware yet, so let's not pubblicize it too much (in any case, it's not so hard to find ... ;)
@Snow White: very interesting piece of software, it could be useful. I don't think it may apply on this case since it seems to provide a good emulation for steam_api.dll protection that, I think, should be different from steam.dll. In any case, I'm not going to tart a fight against Steam, I have this feeling that they wouldn't approve ...
yes, the steam versions, i had (yes, they are telltale's original versions), that i later on uninstalled, due to my PC at that time(omg, back in 2013/2014), crashing, and failing, and me forgetting about these games. BTW, i do remember having bought the non-steam original Telltale Games versions, from their website, wish i still had them now.
Then later on down the road, Telltale Games deciding to shut down, and then steam de-listing them from the steam client itself, looks like they were de-listed sometime in 2018/2019, YET, the games are still listed on the SteamDB website, enableing you to re-install your old games, because you bought them before they were de-listed. Would these games (Bone 1 & TGCRace) still be classed as abandonware in a way ?
@Snow White: i took a look at this SmartSteamEmu tool, it works well with Bone: Out From Boneville, and also Bone: The Great Cow Race. The only thing thats needed to run the games, is the target path, of the executables (or just drag n drop the game's executable file into the tool's window), and the game's steam app id's, and flag "Inject SmartSteamEmu". Both games run fine with it.
Maybe, its something that gho could use, if any other older steam games, are needed to run, without steam installed, along side DxWnd.
Last edit: jds45782 2020-04-19
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
@jds45782 I had a feeling this could be handy from time to time. In fact there were already some game setups like this disscussed here to trobuleshoot additional DxWnd hook.
@gho I considered posting it, and it's also not my intention to promote it here anti-steam, rather as a possible debug or testing tool if needed.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Another crazy oldie: Gooch Grundy's X-Decathlon, available at the Internet Archive Software Collection. It is a crazy nonsensical collection of mini-games that seem really stupid but can become soon addictive. The game is one of the Windows oldest ones (1997!) and shows several problems, but it is also perfectly playable. It is afun both for game players and for bugs hunters!
Interesting.
The game requires DirectX 3, I had to copy D3DRM.DLL to the game folder to make it work. The game also uses the little known video codec Motion Pixels MVI + common Cinepak codec.
The first video (INTRO1.AVI) does not play here on Win7 due to a missing codec. This codec can be installed with MP Aware Player (attached). It works well in my VirtualXP. I haven't tried it install in Win7 (and I'm skeptical in this case). This codec, has video CREDITS.AVI, CHIPINT.AVI, INTRO1.AVI. The second video with Cinepak (INTRO.AVI) played normally.
"A weird effect of shifting background using blits with increasing positions works
correctly only with OpenGL blitter."
Yes, it works with OpenGL Renderer, but the INTRO.AVI video is black. Here on Win7 it works perfectly with SDL or SDL2 Renderer. The gdi renderer also works here, but the first and second screens of the game are cropped, the player selection screen is already fine.
Update:
I have converted these 3 videos to the Cinepak codec, you can download them here https://ulozto.net/file/h1QBxEoQ88WA/videos-7z
The password is X-Decathlon
It works well with FakeCD version 2.05.50c.
Topic about mixed new supported games (you'll see that they are NOT new games, but on the contrary quite old glories!).
First one: you you have children, you should love this one: Payuta and the Ice God
Use the attached export, I had to tweak several flags about the palette handling on GDI, but it should work almost ok (currently, I just have one of the four mini-games that is not working), maybe with some crackled sound.
Last edit: gho 2020-03-10
Another one: Rampage World Tour.
This one still requires some work to eliminate a few strange tweaks to make it running, I hope I will be able to post a valid export sooner or later. The game is promising, it has CD music that works perfectly emulated by DxWnd.
Rampage W.T. is a case stranger than expected.
I installed it from a CD image and WineVDM to run the 16bit installer. Then I extracted the audio tracks and moved to the Music folder. Finally, I had to set reduced color mode 16bit to rampagew.exe.
The game runs (often, not always!) with the attached configuration. Beware: this way the game believes to be running in window mode, but if you type Alt-Enter to switch to fullscreen mode then the game crashes!
But what puzzles me is the fact that the game can run without reduced color mode and a different configuration, but it crashes quite more often (sometimes with puzzling messages like error code 0) and it is impossible to debug with OllyDBG because when the debugger is attached the game crashes before.
An easy case (for me), working with defaults. Phew!
Lunatic Supreme with Chese
Last edit: gho 2020-03-11
I should be wary of old small games: this "Loony Labyrinth Pinball" (p.s. visit MyAbandonware) seemed a simple challenge, but ...
First the installer didn't work. I run it using WinveVDM, perfect tool for 16 bit installers.
But the installer didn't go to the end: at the last step it claimed that a file was missing and I had to quit. As a result, I got all game files, but the installer didn't set the registry entries.
So, the game was almost working, but I had to guess all necessary registry values and put them inside the fake registry. The game uses an old and forgotten function RegSetValueA (not to be confused with the modern and used version RegSetValueExA) so in order to get the necessary logs I also had to add a wrapper to DxWnd to dump the values.
At last, I got the game working! Not all registry values are set properly, but if anyone wants to complete the job, he is welcome! In my fake registry settings the game is registered (by "gho", of course!) and uses the following keys:
Z - left flipper
M - right flipper
SHIFT - plunger
SPACE - nudge
The gameplay is nothing unexpected (it's a pinball, what else?) but the game could be an interesting gym for experiments with legacy audio (wav, midi and all this stuff ..).
In addition, the game comes with two different versions, almost identical. I checked the IAT, and the only difference seems to be the usage of an extra call in user32.dll. What for???
Enjoy.
Last edit: gho 2020-03-16
Updare: better and scalable exports. BTW they show some difference in the hendling of GDI objects.
Always on the pinball cathegory but this time a more recent one: "SlamIt Pinball Big Score" is a 2009 game that mixes D3D9 and OpenGL. Furtunately, this time the mix is not explosive like sometimes happens and the game is a beauty in high resolution and scalable window.
Last edit: gho 2020-03-17
Here is the full registry records (I hope) for Loony Labyrinth.
P.S.
I had some problems with the color palette of the intro images.
Last edit: huh 2020-03-17
Thank you very much.
Analyzing the registry dump I see that my configuration files don't miss that much, but I also see that I made some confusion between the concept of registry subkey and field. The practical effect is that a file like this can't be cut & pasted in the fake registry panel.
I make an example: DxWnd logs shows this error:
the game can't find the subkey value for the "InstState" subkey. This is how the registry dump documents the value:
this is, instead, what would work using DxWnd:
Obviously, regedit is correct, DxWnd is wrong. DxWnd treats the subkey as if it was a field.
This would require some adjustement in DxWnd logic, but I think that the possibility to import a regedit dump file will be very useful. Well, next release, maybe.
Something new and (hopefully) easy: Cycling Manager 4, ready to run with default settings.
In a screenshot you can see an evident clipping of the cyclist, but I checked: the game in native mode behaves the same.
I'm still having trouble with exporting "Loony Labyrinth Pinball (C). Dxw" (and S) on Win7.
With this export, only 1 intro image (Little Wing) with the wrong color palette will be displayed.
If I enable "Initial virtual color setting" - 8 BPP I can see all 3 intro images, but the color palette is wrong. The color palette directly in the game is fine. The situation with (S) is different. The color palette is fine, but the intro image Little Wing is distorted. If I enable "Initial virtual color setting" - 8 BPP I can see all 3 intro images in the correct color palette, but the first two are distorted.
I know this is not a fundamental problem, but it suggests that something is wrong.
Some idea?
Please, remind me about this when this covid19 stuff will be over. At the moment, my Win7 computer is locked into an unreacheable office and I'm not going to volunteer to get back to my desk. I'm working from home, but I'm surrounded by Win10 computers only!
A new entry, weird enough to deserve some mention: "Bone Out from Boneville" is a dx8 adventure game that curiously requires "Hot patch" flag to start, otherwise it hangs DxWnd and makes it necessary to kill DxWnd.exe since the game is not listed in the processes list.
That's fine, but curious: the Hot Patch flag usually gives troubles when you set it, not when it's unset!
Uhmm... there's something weird, the game doesn't scale the size correctly, the image is bound in the initial 800x600 rectangle .... weird. There's more to investigate.
Last edit: gho 2020-04-16
i remember owning ths game, at one point, back when telltale games had thier website running, and i was buying their games, via the wesbite, and not steam (the early days of the walking dead video game, which is what telltale games were most famous for). There was also a sequel to this game, it was called "The Great Cow Race", so you may want to try and find out where to grab this too.
pc gaming wiki for Bone: Out From Boneville:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Bone:_Out_from_Boneville
also, pc gaming wiki for the sequel:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Bone:_The_Great_Cow_Race
From what i remember, these games always ran in windowed mode, it had fullscreen mode option built-in, it would play the game in its correct aspect ratio at fullscreen. 4:3.
also both games, were available on steam, at some point, but have now been removed from sales, there are still steam store pages, available for them , but not buyable ( i think they got de-listed from steam, when telltale games shut down, in the last year or so).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/8310/Bone_Out_From_Boneville/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/8320/Bone_The_Great_Cow_Race/
here:
EDIT: i have just found out, i still have these games, in my steam games list, and they are still downloadbale and playable (must have bought them, around a certain time period), didn't even know i had them. So, i could send you the contents, of one of them... I think the great cow race was only around 250mbish.
Even better, both games, run without steam.
Last edit: jds45782 2020-04-17
Unfortunately, the cow race seems to depend on Steam somehow: trying to run it without produces a "Steam error". It's not the typical Steam protection error (the game doesn't even link Steam libraries), the error code 2:0000065558 doesn't tell much (2 could be a file-not-found errorcode or whatever, 65558 could be a -24 in some unsigned short format).
Even worse, the DxWnd log doesn't show any attempt to open a file, check a device or access a registry key.
At a better glance, the game tries to load a missing (here) Steam.dll. The library is searched in the game folder and, in case of error, in any father folder going upward up to the root drive C:. Adding a fake Steam.dll in the game folder changes the error code, that means that this is the cause.
Maybe you have a Steam.dll somewhere.
Last edit: gho 2020-04-18
ahhh, yes, i did not know this.
i shut down the steam client software, checked if no steam references were running in the background. Started up the games exe, and yes, by joe, it accesses steam ,and forces steam to execute.
The Steam.dll file, accessed by the game, seems to be the one in the root folder. where steam is installed, for me its - D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam
for me, if i added a Steam.dll file to the game folder, if Steam is running in the background(bare in mind the renamed Steam.dll file is still there), the game runs successfully, with steam shut down, game fails to run but no errors show.
Last edit: jds45782 2020-04-18
The protection seems to be tricky (would you think otherwise?). Steam.dll is not in the game folder, it is not statically linked to the game (like stram_api.dll) and if you provide a fake dll the protection ticks even before trying to load any named function call. Probably it's something in the dll DLLMain call that is invoked automatically at the dll loading. And almost for sure the dll talks to the game and Steam in some cyphered way. Clever.
yes, so unless you have a version of the steam client software installed, and running, there's no way of running the game, hence steam DRM. A hacker would sink thier teeth into this.
Well, this particular protection is cracked almost daily I think (by looking at the many uploads on various sites). Not sure if anyone currently busy with this stuff is reading this thread though. I also hope no one will be bothered that it gets disscussed here in the first place.
(edit)
By the way, there's this application that emulates the Client called SmartSteamEmu. I don't know how useful it could be in this case, since I didn't have any actual use for it yet.
Please have a careful look at text information included or otherwise check it in general. I have limited knowledge as to how it can be implemented.
Last edit: White 2020-04-19
@gho
I sent you a PM
@huh: good hint. I saw it before, but I was deceived by the size, too similar to the size of the game demo. This one must be Telltale's original version. Anyway, I don't think this is abandonware yet, so let's not pubblicize it too much (in any case, it's not so hard to find ... ;)
@Snow White: very interesting piece of software, it could be useful. I don't think it may apply on this case since it seems to provide a good emulation for steam_api.dll protection that, I think, should be different from steam.dll. In any case, I'm not going to tart a fight against Steam, I have this feeling that they wouldn't approve ...
yes, the steam versions, i had (yes, they are telltale's original versions), that i later on uninstalled, due to my PC at that time(omg, back in 2013/2014), crashing, and failing, and me forgetting about these games. BTW, i do remember having bought the non-steam original Telltale Games versions, from their website, wish i still had them now.
Then later on down the road, Telltale Games deciding to shut down, and then steam de-listing them from the steam client itself, looks like they were de-listed sometime in 2018/2019, YET, the games are still listed on the SteamDB website, enableing you to re-install your old games, because you bought them before they were de-listed. Would these games (Bone 1 & TGCRace) still be classed as abandonware in a way ?
@Snow White: i took a look at this SmartSteamEmu tool, it works well with Bone: Out From Boneville, and also Bone: The Great Cow Race. The only thing thats needed to run the games, is the target path, of the executables (or just drag n drop the game's executable file into the tool's window), and the game's steam app id's, and flag "Inject SmartSteamEmu". Both games run fine with it.
Maybe, its something that gho could use, if any other older steam games, are needed to run, without steam installed, along side DxWnd.
Last edit: jds45782 2020-04-19
@jds45782 I had a feeling this could be handy from time to time. In fact there were already some game setups like this disscussed here to trobuleshoot additional DxWnd hook.
@gho I considered posting it, and it's also not my intention to promote it here anti-steam, rather as a possible debug or testing tool if needed.
Another crazy oldie: Gooch Grundy's X-Decathlon, available at the Internet Archive Software Collection. It is a crazy nonsensical collection of mini-games that seem really stupid but can become soon addictive. The game is one of the Windows oldest ones (1997!) and shows several problems, but it is also perfectly playable. It is afun both for game players and for bugs hunters!
Interesting.
The game requires DirectX 3, I had to copy D3DRM.DLL to the game folder to make it work. The game also uses the little known video codec Motion Pixels MVI + common Cinepak codec.
The first video (INTRO1.AVI) does not play here on Win7 due to a missing codec. This codec can be installed with MP Aware Player (attached). It works well in my VirtualXP. I haven't tried it install in Win7 (and I'm skeptical in this case). This codec, has video CREDITS.AVI, CHIPINT.AVI, INTRO1.AVI. The second video with Cinepak (INTRO.AVI) played normally.
"A weird effect of shifting background using blits with increasing positions works
correctly only with OpenGL blitter."
Yes, it works with OpenGL Renderer, but the INTRO.AVI video is black. Here on Win7 it works perfectly with SDL or SDL2 Renderer. The gdi renderer also works here, but the first and second screens of the game are cropped, the player selection screen is already fine.
Update:
I have converted these 3 videos to the Cinepak codec, you can download them here
https://ulozto.net/file/h1QBxEoQ88WA/videos-7z
The password is X-Decathlon
It works well with FakeCD version 2.05.50c.
Last edit: huh 2020-04-25