Dark Side of the Moon
Window hooker to run fullscreen programs in window and much more...
Status: Beta
Brought to you by:
ghotik
Menu
▾
▴
I'm trying to get Dark Side of the Moon (1998) running in DxWnd, but no matter what I do the game won't acknowledge the Fake CD I set up with the files.
It could be an interesting case, but please answer to these questions:
1) are you using the 6CD version or the DVD version?
2) How did you install the game? I tried the DVD version but I failed the install
3) On what OS are you running the game? Win7, Win8, Win10 ... ?
4) did you apply the Winterfury WinXP patch?
Your answers will help me finding a solution.
Hi, thank you!
1) I've tried both; I'm currently using the DVD version.
2&3) I installed the game in a WinXP virtual box, then transferred the install directory over to my real Win10 machine.
4) I have not applied that patch yet; from my understanding it is for allowing text to display in the game, and I haven't been able to get to the title screen yet.
I got some partial results by using otvdmx.exe 16bit windows emulator, but in my testbed the game doesn't start, not even if the DVD is mounted.
All seems depending on the content of the file launch32.ini that is probably copied and completed by the setup procedure (in my case, probably something went wrong ...) in the subfolder "SouthPeak Interactive\DSOM" of the install folder .
So, maybe you can help me again by giving the following feedbacks:
1) on your computer is the game working (or, at least, stopping to complain about the missing CD) ?
2) in case the game starts, could you post here the file launch32.ini ? Beware: not one of the generic copies that are within the CD image, but the copy updated by the setup program that is in the game folder. If my guess is right, in that file the key
DiscPath=should be filled with the actual CD drive letter.It's not working on my Windows 10 machine, but I do have it working on a Win98 virtual box (this is using the 6CD version). Here is the launch32.ini created from that.
Also, here are the registry entries from Win98, in case that helps.
I'm puzzled, I still can't understand if we have a technical problem due to the different OS (Win98 vs. Win10) or maybe it's just that the settings for the 6CD version are not identical to those required by the DVD release.
It doesn't seem that the developers made a great amount of changes between the two releases, but you never know ...
Please, be patient. Tomorrow I'll try to install the DVD game on a WinXP machine (that should be possible!!) to get some more information.
If you have the 6CD release (I can't find it anywhere) it could be useful to know the file list of the CD root directory and the CD label, I can't figure out if the game would expect a single DiskN folder or the content of it.
On the 6CD version (https://archive.org/details/DARKSIDE3), labels are Disc1, Disc2.... Disc6. On each disc's root is a folder, DSOM, that has different game files in it depending on the disc (and they have different size files with the same name on each disc, so you can't just merge them all together... I tried that).
Some good news and some bad news ....
I managed to install the DVD version on WinXP. The game works badly (the menu does not show, the movie hangs, you can see the intro movie but it's not playable), but when hooked by DxWnd the situation turns for the better, the game not only is run in a window, but it seems almost playable (at least, for the 20 seconds of my test).
The operation taught me something: you can't hook the Launch32.exe program on HD(the game wouldn't start even without DxWnd!), the program to be hooked is Launch32.exe on the DSoM folder of the DVD, then the "Hook / Shared hook" option will bring the DxWnd hooks to any program run from there. In addition there are several other tricks that I can't write all right now, I need to do more testing and write something clear.
Then I moved the game on Win7 using the files and registry entries of the WinXP host. Here the game can start but hungs after a while. Well, the work is not finished, but the beginning is promising ...
Last edit: gho 2021-05-25
This picture from XP ...
Here are some instructions.
First of all, I'm not sure that the passage between the 6CD version to the DVD version is safe. To avoid the risk, I installed on XP the DVD release to grab the installed files and move them to Win10. If you can't do this operation, please let me know, I could share somewhere the ripped files, the size is not too big (64MB). Same thing I did to get the registry settings.
Then I moved the game files in a folder of my computer (the path in my case is "
C:\Games\Dark Side of the moon\SouthPeak Interactive\DSOM", but anything will do, probably leaving the DSOM final folder) and mounted the DVD image on the drive letter "X:\". These two values will have to be replaced to map your situation.In attach the export file that works well enough (at least, to start the game) on my computer. Some notes:
1) the executable file to be hooked can't be the Launch32.exe on HD, the game expects to be run from the DVD, then probably other executables will be run from there, so I added the "Hook/Ext. inject" and "Hook/Shared hook" flags
2) the registry is queried starting from the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE] key, so this must be the first line in the virtual registry settings. Of course, I had to enable virtual registry and override.
3) Because of the start form DVD, it seems impossible to use the DxWnd virtual CD feature, so you'll have to run the game with the DVD image mounted. Well, I suppose it's better than swapping the 6 CDs in any case ... ;)
4) The DVD drive letter and the install folder are mentioned in many places of the virtual registry. Sadly, you'll have to replace them all carefully. I'm thinking if I could implement a "macro" definition in the registry to do the operation just once, but that would be somewhere in the future.
5) The registry points to some .ocx components. Though I didn't have problems with them so far (I presume ...) it is possible / very likely that these .ocx will have to be registered manually (using regsvr32) to supply the operation made by the installer.
6) The registry also mentions a font file dab1C.fot that you'd better handle somehow. I copied the file in the path of the game folder, but I didn't notice any difference, who knows ...?
Well, this is just the start. This way you should see the intro movies and start the game, then a lot of other problems will begin to show.
Thank you! I'm a lot further along now! A few things I've noticed:
After some testing (and game progress) I came to the conclusion that the game is very good and stable with DxWnd, with only one BIG problem: the text is not visible. This gives you several problems:
1) when you save the game (and sooner or later you will do that!) the savegame file name is not visible, but acquired. If you type a "string" in the edit box you won't see it, but in the SavedGames folder you'll find a "string.dsv" file.
2) when you load a saved game you will see nothing. One little trick: the files are sorted by inverse date, the most recent first, so if you want to load the last savegame just click on the top of the black listbox
3) dialogs: well, the dialogs are there, in the lower part of the screen, but you can't see them. Whenever the game seems blocked, it's probably because there is a dialog selection. Click somewhere in the bottom part of the screen and you'll know later what you randomly picked. This is really no good, not at all!
Let's hope it's possible to fix this single but big problem.
Last edit: gho 2021-05-26
@Ben Newton:
I didn't read your post while writing mine here above.
In your testbed can you see the text? In the positive case, could you share your latest DxWnd configuration? That could save me some time ....
Wait, I got it! I had to drop the updated RICHED32.DLL in the bin game folder! Now it works.
Now I'm trying to update the virtual registry to use the /{path} token, but not having much luck. Can you tell me what exactly it resolves to? Is it the folder that contains DxWnd.exe?
In Help->View Help you can read all you need to know.
In this case, it will make a big difference {path} (the folder where the hooked target is) and {dir} (the working folder of the target program).
I was also considering the possibility to define registry "macros" to assign a custom value to a string that could be repeated many times in the registry ....
I wish to point one fact: it seems to me that the game is not easily fooled by the usage of virtual folders. For instance, in my testbed the game starts with the DVD image mounted on the X: drive, but if I define a fake CD drive the game still keeps asking for the folder location. It seems smarter than I thought ...
Yeah, I still haven't figured out how to get it to not ask me for the location of Disc1 when I first launch it.
I wasn't able to get the game working with the /{path} token, but I figured out another way. If I run this batch file as an administrator after I move the folder to another location, it works great!
Hi Ben.
It seems that I finally found the key to bypass the Disk1 request dialog.
The key is that the program must believe to run the launch32.exe program from the DVD, maybe because there could be some difference between the .ini files there and in the installed folder.
The attached export works here, at least for Disk1. Hopefully, going on in the adventure, the game could avoid to ask about the other disks as well.
To understand this export file, please consider the following operations:
1) mount the DVD image on
X:2) install the game - that is, copy the ripped files from the XP installation - to
d:\Games\DSoTM3) create a fake cd folder
d:\Games\DSoTM\cd4) copy the content of the whole DVD to the fake cd folder
5) unmount the DVD image, it should be no longer necessary
6) hook the launch32.exe file that is in
D:\Games\DSotM\cd\Disc1\DSOM\launch32.exeit should be easy to configure all this with relative paths for the hooks and registry keys to build a perfectly portable configuration...