GTA 3 Crashing in DxWnd After Updating to Windows 10

[Toby]

I ran GTA 3 (in Steam) a couple months ago in DxWnd before upgrading to Windows 10. I just tried it again and now it crashes when I open it. The game opens just fine if I'm not opening it in windowed mode/through DxWnd. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[gho]

Now I'm on vacation and with my Win10 admiral pc broken and waiting for repair. The situation will change soon (holidays are almost over, sic!) and in one or two weeks I should be able to make a test, but in the meanwhile it could be interesting to see the dxwnd log (enable logging as in the picture and send post here the dxwnd.log file created in the game folder)

[Toby]

Attached, thanks!

[gho]

It seems all ok until here

SetFullScreen: FULLSCREEN
err=8876086c switching to mode=16
SUCCESS! device=7128e68
Device hook for IID_IDirect3DDevice8 interface

The error 8876086c is suspicious, though it is reported as successfully managed, but after that I would expect some D3D8 method log, instead nothing is traced and probably the crash starts there.
But from the logs there is also a reference to DxWnd 2.03.73, that is pretty old (current release is 2.03.81). It could be worth trying to upgrade to a new release to benefit from some D3D8 improvement.
If that doesn't work, I'm going to test the game ASAP.

[gho]

I've just made a little test on Win7, where the game works perfectly. But the logs are similar, the only significant thing is that the last log line is before a call to the Direct3DCreate9 pointer, where your game almost surely crashes. I really need a Win10 pc now ....

[Toby]

I made sure to completely update and run the latest .81 version this time. Confirmed in the about I'm running .81. Still got the crash upon opening but did a new log for what it's worth.

[gho]

Thanks.
The log shows a similar situation, with the crash always located at the attempt to start a D3D9 session with Direct3DCreate9 call.
One possibility is that this game is mixing D3D8 (first part of the logs) and D3D9, with DxWnd not properly handling mixed interfaces: this became a very evident problem since Windows 10, and maybe it was never fixed for D3D8/9 games since usually every game uses a specific interface without mixing D3D8 with D3D9. It seems that GTA3 is a unhappy exception to this rule.
I ask you a little patience: as soon as I can grab a Win10 platform I'll try this theory and work for a fix.

[Toby]

I just appreciate the attention you're giving it; thank you again.

[gho]

Hold on: I should have a working Win10 pc within a week ......

[Toby]

Sounds good.

[gho]

Ok, ready to start (and to stop, since the family wants to go out for the weekend, but on monday we resume the hunt): I have nstalled Win10 fresh new, GTA3 and now the problems:
- At the first start, it worked, both fullscreen and windowed. Hurray, but too bad for your problem detection.
- At the second and following attempts with DxWnd, it keeps crashing after the intro movie.

Is this problem like yours? The best option for you would be that I have your very same problem, but we can't take it for granted.
By the way, with the default 800x600 window size, the movie is smaller (640x480 likely) and moved to the upper left window corner. Does this happen to you as well?

update
I noticed that the game seems to crash within a call that is bypassed by setting the Video / "Hide multi-monitor config." flag. Would you try to set this flag and repeat the experiment? I'll be back on testing on monday.

[Toby]

It actually crashes as the DxWnd logo pops up, so I can't even get to the intro movie. If I put it on fullscreen within DxWnd it works, but as soon as I tick the window mode it goes back to crashing as soon as the logo appears.

I tried it with the Hide Multi Monitor Config ticked and got the same error. I have attached a log file from after I tried that.

[gho]

I'm puzzled: I discovered that an initial crash happenes also on my Win7 pc (strange, didn't I say it worked? Well, it's not working now!!!) starting from v2.03.51 on. If I run DxWnd 2.03.50 or earlier (I started from v2.03.30) the game works perfectly.
The problem is that release v2.03.51 changes almost nothing but uses a different shared memory area, so that (don't ask me why...) you can't run versions earlier and later that release. In theory, if you reboot the pc and start DxWnd v2.03.50 it should start and run GTA3 correctly.... but I'm not sure about that. I think there is some weird bug that causes randomic problems, so until I get and fix it, things are going to behave strangely.

[gho]

Hurray! I got a tiny difference in the hook precedure that seems to cause the problem. Reverting to the older code seems to fix the problem, at least on Win7.
Would you mind to try the attached patch and report? In any case, monday I'll try it myself on Win10.

[Toby]

I tried with the patch, same error. Attached the log.

[gho]

Ach! Too bad, things on Win7 were running perfectly. Tomorrow I'll port the software on Win10 and will see what happens ....
In effect, the problem happens only when the hooked pointers behave in a "strange" way. In release v2.03.51 I tried a fix, but I suppose I should understand the problem a little better.

[Toby]

Much thanks! Yeah Windows 8 with GTA3 windowed was working great. Seems like ever since I upgraded to 10 I'm having to adjust little things here and there. Better than being left behind I suppose.

[gho]

Tested on Windows 10 and it works also there.
I tested, just to be sure, also GTA Vice City: there I got a problem, the game shows a dialog telling that the resolution 640x480 is not supported, and terminates. I guess it's my new video card, but I'll have to fix the device settings enumeration to fake a support for lower resolutions also in D3D8/D3D9 interfaces.

[gho]

The problem with GTA Vice City is simple: the game uses a 16bit RGB565 encoding while Win10 only supports 32bit modes. Again, things behave differently in fullscreen mode (where all videocard modes are listed) and windowed mode (where only desktop compatible modes are listed).
The trick is faking the support of 16bit video modes, and the results are ok (see screenshot). Now some cleaning up and testing and a new patch will be backed soon.

[Toby]

Hmm I'm wondering what the heck is going on with my setup then.

[gho]

Please, remind me what are the problems, because with so many games, platforms and users I get easily confused....
In particular:
Are you talking about GTA3 or GTA Vice City?
Are the games working or not and on which platform?
Did you update DxWnd to what release?

Maybe another upload of logfile may help: sometimes the problems look identical, but they are not! Latest v2.03.83 release SHOULD fix the problem on Win10 (it did on my computer!) while older logs are supposed to show the effect of other bugs.

[Toby]

I'm trying to play the normal GTA 3 on a Windows 10 PC. I'm on the latest DxWnd 2.03.83. Just downloaded it, tried running GTA 3 again, same crash as soon as the window with the DxWnd logo pops up. Maybe I need to look at your settings. I don't know if you could share screenshots of all of your settings in the DxWnd interface but maybe if I mirror yours perfectly I can get a better result.

But for what it's worth I'm just running DxWnd vanilla with settings as is as soon as I downloaded the new version.

I logged it, as well. Attached.

[gho]

Uhmmm....

I can easily share the configuration, but apart from some little improvements the game should run perfectly with default settings, so the easiest way to get a proved configuration would be to erase the DxWnd game entry and rebuild it from scratch, either dragging GTA3.exe on the DxWnd window or with the File->Add command. I honestly doubt this is the point. Be aware, anyway, that an old GTA3.dxw import file had a wrong configuration, so better not to use it.

The log shows the same problem as before: Direct3DCreate9 crashing inside! Probably DxWnd gets a wrong function address, but I can't understand why, and, first of all, why YOU!

One desperate possibility: if the problem is caused by some invisible compatibility setting tied with the executable name, you may try to copy GTA3.exe to another filename and then configure this new one, so that the Win10 system won't apply any shim. It is unlikely, but it's easy and right now I'm running short of good ideas.

[Toby]

It works now! I have absolutely no clue how what I did changed anything.

I began by doing as you suggested, copying GTA3 to another filename. I just used GTA-copy.exe and created a new profile for that copy in DxWnd. I ran that in DxWnd and for some reason even with Window Mode ticked it kept opening in fullscreen.

I then tried messing with the compatibility tab in properties for the GTA3.exe file after I tried opening a GTA3 copy, but changing those settings wouldn't open so ultimately I put everything back the way it was.

I then tried running the "testapp" exe file which is in the same folder as GTA3.exe. It's the same size file for some reason. That didn't really open properly unsurprisingly.

I then went back and added another instance of GTA3, this time just the plain GTA3.exe to see if that was going to open in fullscreen even with Window ticked just like the copy did earlier... and it worked just fine! Actually opened in windowed mode and no crash.

Again, no idea what I did or why it's working all of a sudden.

I made no changes to the program itself in between when it crashed last and to now (been on 2.03.83 the whole time)

I removed all profiles of the game within DxWnd and created a new one fresh like I had been every time it was crashing, just to see if replicating those steps exactly would go back to crashing, but it still opened just fine.

ONE thing which is a bit weird is when I start the game in DxWnd - the intro screen and movie are stuck to the 50/50 X/Y dimensions on my screen and it's a bit off center, plus I can't see the whole thing if I open the game in say 900/40 like I prefer for X/Y, but after it gets to the title screen it snaps into place in the window and looks right.

So I'm sorry I can't say precisely what I did differently which suddenly made it work but at least if I was the only one having this issue then I guess we don't need a specific solution for anyone else.

Thanks for the ongoing support over the last week or so, haha.

[Danza]

Hello

I've encountered a similar issue using the steam version of GTA 3, but my issue still isn't resolved. It will say that the game has stopped working on launch. I tried one of the attatched fixes in an earlier post and a newer version of the program, but instead of immediately crashing, an unhandled exception is thrown by the game.

On my laptop it used to crash but then would appear to work out of nowhere, and then go back to crashing again another day. Another thing i noticed is when it did actually work, I had to launch the game through steam to window it, it would crash if I launched it through dxwnd.

Any additional help/info would be appreciated.

And in addition to this, if i launch it through dxwnd and then it crashes, I notice that one of the dll's is still being used by GTA3.exe even though it isnt running. It will even say the game is running on steam but can find no processes relating to it. Playing in fullscreen doesn't seem to cause this problem.

Yet another edit, I should mention that the exe im using is a fixed exe for some graphics glitches and realised that may be the problem as I used teh standard exe before, that crashed too, but at least it would run sometimes.
Nevermind, this didn't fix it, and I checked again and the dxwnd.dll is still being used after gta 3 should've been killed.