Hide Desktop Background option causes Might and Magic VI to immediately...
Window hooker to run fullscreen programs in window and much more...
Status: Beta
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The title says it all. Whenever I try to use the Hide Desktop Background option with Might and Magic VI ... BAM ... it crashes. It does manage to hide the desktop behind black bars but then Might and Magic VI crashes immediately afterwards before loading the intro screen for the game. Problem exists in latest version of DxWnd: v2.04.03 fx1
Uhm.... do you recall a less recent version of DxWnd where the game worked with "hide desktop" option? That would help me to identify the problem more rapidly. In any case don't worry, I'll do also without this information.
The only other version I've tried was DxWnd v2.04.01 fx6 and that version had the same problem.
Ah, ok, so it's not a regression problem. I know that not all games can bare this "hide desktop" option (it seems that this changes the way window messages are flowing between the different windows, and in some case this hurts ...) but let me try this case....
Just figured I'd bring it to your attention. It's not a huge deal to me or anything but I can tell you've put a lot of work into this so I'm guessing you want to know when something's not quite right.
Speaking of that, I've read elsewhere that some games won't work correctly in fullscreen mode with DxWnd. Might and Magic VI appears to be one of those games. The nearest scaling doesn't take affect when I use the "Fullscreen only" option. It only works with "Run in window". That's the only reason I was trying to hide the background to begin with; I couldn't get the nice, crisp nearest-neighbor scaling I wanted in fullscreen mode so I resorted to windowed. :)
You are perfectly right and centered the core of the problem: the feature is not vital and anybody can happily survive wthout that, but DxWnd needs a fix to demonstrate a good quality and care towards its users.
Fortunately, this was an easy case, a missing pointer causing the crash in all programs that didn't happen to link that system function (most programs do, and this is why I never realized that!).
The attached dll could replace the one in last DxWnd release and fix the problem.
Then, about rendering quality, I was wondering if you tried the integrated bilinear biltering yet ....?
Hey, thanks! I'll try this out when I get a chance.
It works! Thanks for creating this awesome tool. I've been hoping for years to be able to play Might and Magic VI on a modern system with properly upscaled graphics. :)
Off topic (but not too much) I was rather annoyed by the beeautiful but unstoppable and long game intro movie. I take it that someone must have found some trick to handle this already, maybe a game patch or the hint to delete some movie file from hard disk, but anyway I verified if DxWnd was able to help.
It is possible to set a fake duration for each movie (let's say 10 frames ....) so that each movie is played for a fixed and limited time.
Do you find such a feature of some interest?
Yeah, the intro movie kind be kind of a pain the first time you run the game but you can import a Windows registry key that will tell the game you've already launched it once before so that you can skip through the movie without having to watch it. I've attached the reg file used with Windows 10 for this.
Other than the forced first viewing of the intro movie, I don't think it's necessary to shorten any other video in the game but others may disagree.
Better leave to anyone his own decision. This version will skip the intro movies if the Libs / MM / "No movies" flag is set. The flag was already considered for Video for Windows movies, now it works also for SmackW32 rendered movies.
A small tech note: the application may not like an error condition on movie file open (and in effect mm6 crashes if the SmackOpen call fails) so the movie suppression is simulated by faking a movie length of 1 frame only. That may produce a small video blink, but it seems the safest way to make it.