I've seen the Warlords 3 DLR screenshot amongst others, so I decided to give it a try (W3 is one of my most beloved games). Could anyone help me with the best DxWnd settings for this game (DxWnd has so many of them so it's easy to get lost in it)? Seems even while using DxWnd I'm forced to use -wincursor parameter for EXE that gives simplified in-game cursors but prevents it from glitching. Is it possible to get the full original experience from W3DLR with DxWnd? Any useful advises would be welcome.
Thanks in advance.
Last edit: Vissavald 2017-05-03
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Sure, I'll be happy to help.
I suppose DLR stands for Darklord Rising, isn't it? In effect, that game was one of the first that I tried to include in the DxWnd supported games list, and apart form some minor glitches, the game was integrated very well.
But here I didn't have an happy endig: I noticed that the game had the bad habit of crashing almost always after only a few turns, in random ways. I tried to find what was wrong with DxWnd, but soon I realized that, maybe a little less frequently, the game was crashing also running in native mode, so I guessed that the problem was elsewhere.
But if you can help me to find a stable game release, I will start again to work on this splendid game that deserves a much better support.
You could PM me (send a proivate mail through SF service) giving some details about your game release, configuration and possible patches, so that my testing environment will be the same as yours. Later I'm going to put all things togheter and provide some feedback.
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Uhm, I don't know .... I mounted my CD, then followed some forum suggestions to install the game on a 64 bit machine (copy all files on HD, then replace SETUP\IS_SETUP.EXE with the Setup32.exe generic installer) and installed the game. Then I applied the v1.02 english patch and hooked Darklord.exe to DxWnd with default options. The game works perfectly, but now and then I got again the nasty blocking bug (the game freezes with no apparent reason).
The cause of the problem is unknown but not apparently related to DxWnd. Someone claimed, if I remember correctly, that could be caused by a multiprocessor environment or too fast CPU. Anyway there are some tricks that can be applied to try to manage the problem:
by DxWnd:
set "Compat. / Set single core process affinity" flag to run the game on a single CPU core
set "Compat. / Limit available resources", just in case ....
by the OS:
add the "-wincursors" argument to the program execution command
try setting the Win98 compatibility
It should be noted that depending on the platform and Windows upgrade the Win98 compatibility may or may not let DxWnd work, so it can't be always applied together with dxWnd control.
I'll try some experiments, but I'm not sure I'll be able to identify the problem, so in the meanwhile the game is playable, but you have to save the game as often as possible, because it hangs.
Here in attach an export file that you could import in your DxWnd configuration, having care to update the game paths in the main configuration tab.
Oh, my! Here we are finally with a good setting.
My mistake, I copied wrong directions or typed incorrectly, but as a matter of fact all my tests were made with the fancy colored animated cursors, that work on Win7-10 but may cause the program block.
Finally, I typed the correct option "/wincursor" on the argument line (see screenshot) and the cursors became of a dull black&white unanimated shape, but the game was working with no problems at all!
So, it's up to you whether to risk a little, save often and enjoy the nice cursors or take the safe path of the /wincursor option.
The game works perfectly with DxWnd default options + "Input / position message processing", but for sure scaling it properly and applying bilinear filtering, it becomes a joy for the eyes! In the screenshot I set 1200x900 window size + "bilinear filtering" + "hide desktop bckground" and at game startup I picked the highest 1024x768 screen resoluion. I tried also the fake-fullscreen modes ("Desktop" and "Desktop work area") but here it seems that there is some cursor problem to fix.
Enjoy!
Wow! Tonight is the night (especially considering the fact that I have a holiday tomorrow). So in the dark of the night, when my wife and children will be peacefully sleeping, Lord Bane will get a good kick to his behind! :)
Thanks a lotta lot! If everything will be alright, I'll bring the good news to Warlorders community, if you don't mind (poor ones still mess with their rusty virtual machines).
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Very good. Feel free to ask for clarifications about how to get optimal rendering. This evening (it's GMT+1 ROME here) I'm going to check last details and, hopefully, provide some good and tested configurations.
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Cyberstorm? Mmm, juicy...
Let me check and see if worth opening a new thread.
In the meanwhile, I confirm that there is a bug in mouse handling in fake-fullscreen modes that prevents you to reach some lateral areas of the screen (unfortunately, the savegame button is there!).
The problem can be bypassed by creating the fake-fullscreen with hand-calculated coordinates (for instance, on my 1680x1050 desktop I picked a window position at 140,0 upper-left coordinates and 1400x1050 window size), but it is an annoying calculation that has to be repeated for each desktop resolution. Let me ty to fix also this annoyance before making the big announce.
P.s. what country do you live in? I suppose the horny avatar and the nickname don't necessarily imply you're a viking ...
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It's an image of a severe warlord from - suddenly - Warlords 2 game :) And I'm Russian, and there are here still some ignorants that continue to yammer about vikings as Ancient Rus and other bullcrap (that's not supported anymore even by most Swedish and other Scandinavian archeologists and historians) :D
But as for nickname, you're right here, Vissavald is the Nordic spelling of Russian name Vsevolod ("all-ruler" or "all-wielder") met in sagas (as a child, I loved much to read something like Edda, Beowulf, Nibelungs and other similar stuff).
Last edit: Vissavald 2017-05-04
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Ok, I'm pretty satisfied: also the mouse bug was found and fixed.
Here in attach there is all necessary stuff to enjoy the game in a gorgeous high-quality mode and also gain some fame (after some testing) when announcing the DxWnd support to the community. I happily leave the honor to you.
The archive contains in practive what could be a new release of DxWnd with new exe and dlls, all files to be replaced in the current DxWnd folder. In addition there are two export files to ease the game configuration:
"Warlords III Darklord Rising.dxw" is the standard export file, with default settings and positioning at 50,50 and 800x600 window size
"Warlords III Darklord Rising (hq).dxw" is the high quality configuration, with settings for the best game quality (fake-fullscreen, bilienar filtering etc. see the notes in the configuration), provided that the computer has enough power (don't worry, my below-average PC runs it with no pain).
I also had a look at the two Cyberstorms episodes, but definitely these will require a separated (and long) new thread!
No-no-no, no honor to me, you'll receive all the glory you deserved, gold, women, slaves, the level-up and the Ring of the Prince Charming (+5 to Charisma) :)
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I'm very happy to see you guys working on this game. Both of you. Vissavald for brining it under your attention and gho for all the efforts he put into this.
Warlords III Darklords rising (Actually Reign of Heroes) was my first real and my very first own PC game I received as a gift from the local PC store when I bought my very first PC.
Since then I have a Steam library with a few hundred games and this one is still missing. There is no normal way to get the game. Steam and GoG don't sell it and the current owner of the license doesn't seems interested to publish it again in digital form for modern computers.
I have so many memories from this game. From the first time I saw an animated intro with a real actor playing as Lord Bane, the first time I experienced random maps and see the battlefield I only knew from tabletop games came to life on my first PC.
I want to thank you so much and will do my best the coming days to report issues I experience.
Thank you!!!
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The issue is that SSG (publishers of DLR) had lost the source code for 1.02 patch, and Steve Fawkner (creator of DLR) has now only 1.00 code. And in our days, no one, even Tim Sowden aka KGB, the keeper of Warlorders site, keeper of DLR and Warlords 4 source codes and maker of patches for Warlords 4 - now, again, NO ONE will take the trouble to patch again the 25-years-old game which only a dozen of old freaks would have the interest to buy and play.
And Steve now switched to mobile and casual market, he supports full-time the cross-platform free-to-play game Gems of War in the vein of his previous Puzzle Quests folly (think of match-3 casual nonsense in fantasy wrappings). Seems the donation system in this game keeps him satisfied and content with his present game-making life, So who are we to judge him for this? Australia is a very expensive country to live in, as I heard of... And he's out of his youth romantic age ong ago, when one could make games for the pure art and enthusiasm...
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It's surely a vicky idea, but having the 1.00 source code and being able to disassemble the executables of 1.00 and 1.02, shouldn't it relatively easier to spot the patched assembly, associate it to the source code and guess the nature of the fix? I'm not saying I could do it, but if anyone could be so kind to send me the source (or, better yet, to push it to some source code site like github or such) .....
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Well, you might ask Tim Sowden (aka KGB) at Warlorders dot com, he should own 1.00 source code IIRC. And we have 1.02 patchlog, so all changes have been documented.
But AFAIK Tim wanted and tried to continue patching Darklords Rising but was either unable or lacked time for it.
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I didn't like proposing a leaked beto to a wider audience, so I just posted a new v2.04.28 release on the SF portal that, apart from the Help->About string, is identical to yesterday's release. If you want to spread the news, you can make reference to this "official" new release ad the included exports.
While in the processing of cleaning up things I tried to apply the same /wincursor trick to the Warlords former episode, Warlords III Reign of Heroes, but I realized that the same trick doesn't work, at least not on the unpatched game version, so I think I'll try to deal with this problem a little later.
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As I understand well I downloaded the "v2.04.28 build" from the main SF page and use them with the DLR files you provided in the download in your earlier post.
Take your time and thank you again.
You helped me before searching for a solution for Rome Total War. The developers for that game provied a new patch already themselve in the mean time in case you was not aware of that.
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What a shame, the RTW developers forgot to tell me! Well, maybe I'll forgive them and will try again to manage their game with DxWnd. ;)
Thank you for the news!
Last edit: gho 2017-05-05
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Don't forget about this site! You can find there almost anything you want, safe only games that had been officially released in Russia (guys don't want to have problems). And they officially collaborate with GOG (you can find GOG links on pages of games that GOG sells, and honestly, I suspect that GOG sometimes "borrows" games of DOS-era from Old-Games.ru...:) Because I do know for sure that some releases they sell are just found in Internet, on torrents or something like this... Some time ago I was a huge GOG-fan but now I look on things more cynically :)
Last edit: gho 2017-05-05
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On SF posts containing valid URLs are sent in the moderation area where they stand until the forum owner (me) approves or deletes them. This causes an annoying delay in the post display, so my advice is to avoid full URLs as much as possible. I also took the freedom to alter a little your reference to old-games.ru stripping the http head and tail to make it a little more compliant to SFpolicies.
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I know that this was maybe unasked for, but I do hate to leave a job in the half.....
So here is how to manage the poor relative, Warlord III Reign of Heroes:
1) start from a US CD version, I got a US v1.01.
2) install it on a WinXP 32 bit platform, next step will tell you why
3) apply the 16 bit US v1.02 patch
4) grab all installed files to bring'em all on the fucking 64 bit you bought recently
5) insert the CD and copy the files on your pc HD
6) start DxWnd using the attached export files that add the -wincursor argument. Of course, we made all this fuss just because the -wincursor trick was implemented only on the parthed game release!
So, now you can enjoy this previous chapter (no, please, don't ask me why since you got Darklords!) either in window or in gorgeous fake fullscreen bilinear mode (or, if you like, also without DxWnd in true fullscreen creating a -cursor shoutcut).
P.s. you still need the CD, but I saw that making a no-CD crack for this game is a hacker's beginner excercise....
Hi everyone.
I've seen the Warlords 3 DLR screenshot amongst others, so I decided to give it a try (W3 is one of my most beloved games). Could anyone help me with the best DxWnd settings for this game (DxWnd has so many of them so it's easy to get lost in it)? Seems even while using DxWnd I'm forced to use -wincursor parameter for EXE that gives simplified in-game cursors but prevents it from glitching. Is it possible to get the full original experience from W3DLR with DxWnd? Any useful advises would be welcome.
Thanks in advance.
Last edit: Vissavald 2017-05-03
Sure, I'll be happy to help.
I suppose DLR stands for Darklord Rising, isn't it? In effect, that game was one of the first that I tried to include in the DxWnd supported games list, and apart form some minor glitches, the game was integrated very well.
But here I didn't have an happy endig: I noticed that the game had the bad habit of crashing almost always after only a few turns, in random ways. I tried to find what was wrong with DxWnd, but soon I realized that, maybe a little less frequently, the game was crashing also running in native mode, so I guessed that the problem was elsewhere.
But if you can help me to find a stable game release, I will start again to work on this splendid game that deserves a much better support.
You could PM me (send a proivate mail through SF service) giving some details about your game release, configuration and possible patches, so that my testing environment will be the same as yours. Later I'm going to put all things togheter and provide some feedback.
Hi, gho. Check your incoming messages, please.
Got it.Let me get home and set some testbed.
Uhm, I don't know .... I mounted my CD, then followed some forum suggestions to install the game on a 64 bit machine (copy all files on HD, then replace SETUP\IS_SETUP.EXE with the Setup32.exe generic installer) and installed the game. Then I applied the v1.02 english patch and hooked Darklord.exe to DxWnd with default options. The game works perfectly, but now and then I got again the nasty blocking bug (the game freezes with no apparent reason).
The cause of the problem is unknown but not apparently related to DxWnd. Someone claimed, if I remember correctly, that could be caused by a multiprocessor environment or too fast CPU. Anyway there are some tricks that can be applied to try to manage the problem:
by DxWnd:
by the OS:
It should be noted that depending on the platform and Windows upgrade the Win98 compatibility may or may not let DxWnd work, so it can't be always applied together with dxWnd control.
I'll try some experiments, but I'm not sure I'll be able to identify the problem, so in the meanwhile the game is playable, but you have to save the game as often as possible, because it hangs.
Here in attach an export file that you could import in your DxWnd configuration, having care to update the game paths in the main configuration tab.
Last edit: gho 2017-05-03
Thanks a lot for your work. I'll try ASAP to give you some feedback.
It's a pity that playing with original full-colored and animated cursors seems impossible on modern gear.
Oh, my! Here we are finally with a good setting.
My mistake, I copied wrong directions or typed incorrectly, but as a matter of fact all my tests were made with the fancy colored animated cursors, that work on Win7-10 but may cause the program block.
Finally, I typed the correct option "/wincursor" on the argument line (see screenshot) and the cursors became of a dull black&white unanimated shape, but the game was working with no problems at all!
So, it's up to you whether to risk a little, save often and enjoy the nice cursors or take the safe path of the /wincursor option.
The game works perfectly with DxWnd default options + "Input / position message processing", but for sure scaling it properly and applying bilinear filtering, it becomes a joy for the eyes! In the screenshot I set 1200x900 window size + "bilinear filtering" + "hide desktop bckground" and at game startup I picked the highest 1024x768 screen resoluion. I tried also the fake-fullscreen modes ("Desktop" and "Desktop work area") but here it seems that there is some cursor problem to fix.
Enjoy!
Wow! Tonight is the night (especially considering the fact that I have a holiday tomorrow). So in the dark of the night, when my wife and children will be peacefully sleeping, Lord Bane will get a good kick to his behind! :)
Thanks a lotta lot! If everything will be alright, I'll bring the good news to Warlorders community, if you don't mind (poor ones still mess with their rusty virtual machines).
Very good. Feel free to ask for clarifications about how to get optimal rendering. This evening (it's GMT+1 ROME here) I'm going to check last details and, hopefully, provide some good and tested configurations.
Well, maybe with the help of your magnificent program I'll survive the parting with my beloved WinXP :) And if it would run Cyberstorm 1-2 games... :D
Last edit: Vissavald 2017-05-04
Cyberstorm? Mmm, juicy...
Let me check and see if worth opening a new thread.
In the meanwhile, I confirm that there is a bug in mouse handling in fake-fullscreen modes that prevents you to reach some lateral areas of the screen (unfortunately, the savegame button is there!).
The problem can be bypassed by creating the fake-fullscreen with hand-calculated coordinates (for instance, on my 1680x1050 desktop I picked a window position at 140,0 upper-left coordinates and 1400x1050 window size), but it is an annoying calculation that has to be repeated for each desktop resolution. Let me ty to fix also this annoyance before making the big announce.
P.s. what country do you live in? I suppose the horny avatar and the nickname don't necessarily imply you're a viking ...
It's an image of a severe warlord from - suddenly - Warlords 2 game :) And I'm Russian, and there are here still some ignorants that continue to yammer about vikings as Ancient Rus and other bullcrap (that's not supported anymore even by most Swedish and other Scandinavian archeologists and historians) :D
But as for nickname, you're right here, Vissavald is the Nordic spelling of Russian name Vsevolod ("all-ruler" or "all-wielder") met in sagas (as a child, I loved much to read something like Edda, Beowulf, Nibelungs and other similar stuff).
Last edit: Vissavald 2017-05-04
Ok, I'm pretty satisfied: also the mouse bug was found and fixed.
Here in attach there is all necessary stuff to enjoy the game in a gorgeous high-quality mode and also gain some fame (after some testing) when announcing the DxWnd support to the community. I happily leave the honor to you.
The archive contains in practive what could be a new release of DxWnd with new exe and dlls, all files to be replaced in the current DxWnd folder. In addition there are two export files to ease the game configuration:
"Warlords III Darklord Rising.dxw" is the standard export file, with default settings and positioning at 50,50 and 800x600 window size
"Warlords III Darklord Rising (hq).dxw" is the high quality configuration, with settings for the best game quality (fake-fullscreen, bilienar filtering etc. see the notes in the configuration), provided that the computer has enough power (don't worry, my below-average PC runs it with no pain).
I also had a look at the two Cyberstorms episodes, but definitely these will require a separated (and long) new thread!
No-no-no, no honor to me, you'll receive all the glory you deserved, gold, women, slaves, the level-up and the Ring of the Prince Charming (+5 to Charisma) :)
I'm very happy to see you guys working on this game. Both of you. Vissavald for brining it under your attention and gho for all the efforts he put into this.
Warlords III Darklords rising (Actually Reign of Heroes) was my first real and my very first own PC game I received as a gift from the local PC store when I bought my very first PC.
Since then I have a Steam library with a few hundred games and this one is still missing. There is no normal way to get the game. Steam and GoG don't sell it and the current owner of the license doesn't seems interested to publish it again in digital form for modern computers.
I have so many memories from this game. From the first time I saw an animated intro with a real actor playing as Lord Bane, the first time I experienced random maps and see the battlefield I only knew from tabletop games came to life on my first PC.
I want to thank you so much and will do my best the coming days to report issues I experience.
Thank you!!!
The issue is that SSG (publishers of DLR) had lost the source code for 1.02 patch, and Steve Fawkner (creator of DLR) has now only 1.00 code. And in our days, no one, even Tim Sowden aka KGB, the keeper of Warlorders site, keeper of DLR and Warlords 4 source codes and maker of patches for Warlords 4 - now, again, NO ONE will take the trouble to patch again the 25-years-old game which only a dozen of old freaks would have the interest to buy and play.
And Steve now switched to mobile and casual market, he supports full-time the cross-platform free-to-play game Gems of War in the vein of his previous Puzzle Quests folly (think of match-3 casual nonsense in fantasy wrappings). Seems the donation system in this game keeps him satisfied and content with his present game-making life, So who are we to judge him for this? Australia is a very expensive country to live in, as I heard of... And he's out of his youth romantic age ong ago, when one could make games for the pure art and enthusiasm...
It's surely a vicky idea, but having the 1.00 source code and being able to disassemble the executables of 1.00 and 1.02, shouldn't it relatively easier to spot the patched assembly, associate it to the source code and guess the nature of the fix? I'm not saying I could do it, but if anyone could be so kind to send me the source (or, better yet, to push it to some source code site like github or such) .....
Well, you might ask Tim Sowden (aka KGB) at Warlorders dot com, he should own 1.00 source code IIRC. And we have 1.02 patchlog, so all changes have been documented.
But AFAIK Tim wanted and tried to continue patching Darklords Rising but was either unable or lacked time for it.
I didn't like proposing a leaked beto to a wider audience, so I just posted a new v2.04.28 release on the SF portal that, apart from the Help->About string, is identical to yesterday's release. If you want to spread the news, you can make reference to this "official" new release ad the included exports.
While in the processing of cleaning up things I tried to apply the same /wincursor trick to the Warlords former episode, Warlords III Reign of Heroes, but I realized that the same trick doesn't work, at least not on the unpatched game version, so I think I'll try to deal with this problem a little later.
As I understand well I downloaded the "v2.04.28 build" from the main SF page and use them with the DLR files you provided in the download in your earlier post.
Take your time and thank you again.
You helped me before searching for a solution for Rome Total War. The developers for that game provied a new patch already themselve in the mean time in case you was not aware of that.
What a shame, the RTW developers forgot to tell me! Well, maybe I'll forgive them and will try again to manage their game with DxWnd. ;)
Thank you for the news!
Last edit: gho 2017-05-05
www.old-games.ru
Don't forget about this site! You can find there almost anything you want, safe only games that had been officially released in Russia (guys don't want to have problems). And they officially collaborate with GOG (you can find GOG links on pages of games that GOG sells, and honestly, I suspect that GOG sometimes "borrows" games of DOS-era from Old-Games.ru...:) Because I do know for sure that some releases they sell are just found in Internet, on torrents or something like this... Some time ago I was a huge GOG-fan but now I look on things more cynically :)
Last edit: gho 2017-05-05
On SF posts containing valid URLs are sent in the moderation area where they stand until the forum owner (me) approves or deletes them. This causes an annoying delay in the post display, so my advice is to avoid full URLs as much as possible. I also took the freedom to alter a little your reference to old-games.ru stripping the http head and tail to make it a little more compliant to SFpolicies.
Yeah, I've already realized it and took into consideration. No more direct links from me.
I know that this was maybe unasked for, but I do hate to leave a job in the half.....
So here is how to manage the poor relative, Warlord III Reign of Heroes:
1) start from a US CD version, I got a US v1.01.
2) install it on a WinXP 32 bit platform, next step will tell you why
3) apply the 16 bit US v1.02 patch
4) grab all installed files to bring'em all on the fucking 64 bit you bought recently
5) insert the CD and copy the files on your pc HD
6) start DxWnd using the attached export files that add the -wincursor argument. Of course, we made all this fuss just because the -wincursor trick was implemented only on the parthed game release!
So, now you can enjoy this previous chapter (no, please, don't ask me why since you got Darklords!) either in window or in gorgeous fake fullscreen bilinear mode (or, if you like, also without DxWnd in true fullscreen creating a -cursor shoutcut).
P.s. you still need the CD, but I saw that making a no-CD crack for this game is a hacker's beginner excercise....
Last edit: gho 2017-05-06