Myth: The Fallen Lords

[Paul Galbraith]

I've been trying to get Myth TFL running on my Windows 10 system, and I've had the most success using DxWnd and the latest v1.5 patch of the game from Project Magma. I'd like to get things running fullscreen and the only settings I've changed to get that working are flipping on the OpenGL hook, and on the main tab under Position, enabling "hide desktop background" and "keep aspect ratio" options, and choosing the "desktop" display button. After initial basic testing things seem to work well, the only noticeable problem is that the cutscene video is very slow (much slower than when running in windowed mode) and displays some clear artifact glitching. This game uses smackw32.dll but enabling the corresponding hook in DxWnd doesn't seem to make any difference.

Can anybody suggest some settings that might improve the smacker cutscene video performance when running fullscreen? TIA!

[huh]

Seems, that the Timing-Skip-delay-5 flag might help, but I only tried with the introductory video for a short time. Interlaced videos look better with the DirectX-Filter-deinterlace flag ;-)

[dippy dipper]

This is from memory but I recall being able to play Myth 1 in 3Dfx mode using nGlide.

I also ran Myth 2 with the Project Magma patch and "The Fallen Levels v2" mod to play Myth 1 campaign on the newer Myth 2 engine. In this case there was no need for Dxwnd or nGlide. Of course this is not an option if you only have Myth 1 or if you absolutely want to play using the older game engine.

[Paul Galbraith]

Thanks for the tips! Yes I've seen the majority of advice is to give up on running Myth TFL and instead run Myth II with the TFL mod, but I'm a purist and would prefer to get the original working if I can.

With the v1.3 version (the last official version from Bungie) I too have had some success using nglide (one of the main changes with the 1.5 patch is to add an opengl rendering option, which works nicely with DxWnd alone). I've tried the 1.3 version under DxWnd but the main problem I encounter is that the smacker video cutscenes appear in a separate window underneath the game window (and with the wrong resolution) so you have to switch via taskbar or alt-tab to see them, then back to the game window ... any suggestions on fixing this are also greatly appreciated. I also couldn't run this version without setting windows xp compatility on the exe file ... leaving this off and setting "limit available resources" on the compatibility tab in DxWnd still resulted in an out of memory error when launching.

I now have the v1.5 Project Magma patch working (albeit not tested much, just launching into the start of the game's first level) thanks to the above suggestions from huh and dippy! The only changes I've made from default are:

• Turn on expert mode (options -> expert mode)
• "Main" tab:
  • In "Position" options:
    • enable "Hide desktop background"
    • enable "Keep aspect ratio"
    • select "Desktop" option
• "OpenGL" tab:
  • enable "Hook OpenGL"
• "Timing" tab:
  • In "Frame per Second" options:
    • enable "Skip"
    • set "delay (msec)" to 5.
• "DirectX" tab:
  • In "Emulation" options:
    • set "Filter" to "deinterlace"

[gho]

I'm noticing that hooking smackw32 and checking also the "Fix smack/bink loop" the intro movie disappears (it is rendered full black). This is weird, it never happened as far as I can remember. I'll have to investigate ...

[dippy dipper]

I also couldn't run this version without setting windows xp compatility on the exe file ... leaving this off and setting "limit available resources" on the compatibility tab in DxWnd still resulted in an out of memory error when launching.

The "limit available resources" flag usually needs to be paired with the hook tab's "inject suspended process" for it to take effect. (This also requires one to launch the game from the Dxwnd GUI.)

[Paul Galbraith]

Thought I'd give a go at moving the game to a new location as well, but no luck. There's a registry entry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Bungie that points to the exe file, but changing this to match the new location and launching the game with DxWnd, it still dies right away without any error message and registry op logging didn't show any registry lookup anyways. Well I guess I've had enough success for today at least, maybe I'll try this again later.

[gho]

In my computer, the uninstal.log file holds this section:

[RegNames]
0=HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,.gor,
1=HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,Myth.Gor,
2=HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,Myth.Gor\DefaultIcon,
3=HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,Myth.Gor\shell\open\command,
4=HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,SOFTWARE\Bungie\Myth\1.0,.EXE
5=HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,SOFTWARE\Bungie\Myth\1.0,CDDrive

Probably this should give some hints to where to search more more registry keys to update. Or (maybe safer) uninstall and reinstall, probably it would take less time!
You could also try to build a fake registry section in te DxWnd configuration to make the game relocable anywhere without install. Maybe I'll try later ...

[Paul Galbraith]

That's exactly what I was thinking to do, but gave up after realizing that even manually changing that registry key with regedit to the new location didn't seem to make it work.

[huh]

That's interesting, I transferred my installation from VirtualXP to Win7 and the only thing I changed was the path here

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Bungie\Myth]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Bungie\Myth\1.0]
".EXE"="C:\Games\Myth_TFL\myth_tfl.exe"
"CDDrive"="F:"

(Of course, in the .EXE section there are two backslashes everywhere, SF displays only one)

[Paul Galbraith]

I just noticed that Myth writes a log in the program directory. I see lots of these type of errors when running from my new location, but not from the original one. I suspect maybe because I dumped it into a Dropbox dir and that's causing some conflict.

Error: File system Open in .\Myth1Code\tag_files.c, line #1981: error #32 while opening the tag file (fake error code) for 'maps:maps'.
Error: File system Open in .\Myth1Code\tag_files.c, line #824: error #32 while writing (#38,#45) from 'maps:maps'.

[Paul Galbraith]

Confirmed, moving the folder out of dropbox fixes it. No need to even touch the EXE registry entry, I don't think it's used.

Too bad, my only reason for moving it was to have a portable version in the cloud :-(.

[gho]

DxWnd hooking didn't work on networked drives because the SetWindowsHook system call is not supported on this situation. Probably a cloud driver may have the same limitations.
Does something happen if you set expert mode and change hook type to "Inject suspended process" or "Debugger mode" ?
Uhm... is there a way to have a free cloud drive to make tests by myself?

[Paul Galbraith]

I don't think that has anything to do with this problem. I think what's happening is Myth opens, writes and closes the local/maps/maps file many times in sucession, but as soon as it's done a write Dropbox grabs it and temporarily locks it in order to fire it up into the cloud, thus blocking Myth from performing the next open/write. I had Myth at E:\Users\Paul\Dropbox...\Myth ... and simply moving it to E:\Users\Paul\Myth fixed it.

[ZellSF]

Setting render to gdi also helps with Smacker video performance, but makes deinterlacing unavailable. You also still have to use frame skip delay, but you can set it lower. Which isn't all that useful since the game seems to run at 30 FPS anyway.

Also not mentioned here, probably not relevant to OP, but might be relevant to others reading this later: this game crashes when too many resolutions are enumerated, so set Screen resolution to SVGA or HDMI.

Then check both Custom resolution and Initial resolution and write what resolution you want the game to think it's running at there. This will determine UI size (obviously it's better to stick to integer scales. I set the game to run at 1280x720 and DxWnd to upscale to 3840x2160).