How To Run Nancy Drew In Windowed Mode Using DxWnd
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Hi all! I am a lifelong ND fan and a little while ago I began a complete replay of all games in order! I am currently on #14 Danger by Design and just got a second monitor so I can still be in an active discord call with friends, seeing their messages and streams while I play.
However, I realized adding the second monitor completely messed up my game window. Where it typically was "full screen" with black bars on either side to compensate for the differing ratio, it was now all stretched out to fill my 1920 x 1080 (16:9) desktop instead of staying within its usual ratio (4:3). This lead me down a rabbit hole trying to find solutions, only to find DxWnd! It was a steep learning curve trying to figure out all of the settings to get my game to run at a good resolution, with no mouse trail glitch, and the ability to move my cursor out of the window back to my second monitor if needed.
Finally, after two long days of trial and error, I found the perfect settings for my PC to run Nancy Drew almost flawlessly (I haven't had much time yet to play through the rest of the game to confirm no further issues) so I wanted to share here in case anyone else might benefit from this option when playing these games!
The process to get to the screenshots I included are just to download the program and in the main window click Edit > Add
The blue bars indicate where you will add your individual path to your game.exe for both Path and Launch
((note: there may be a couple of unnecessary options selected that don't make a difference, but I was too scared to change anything once I got it running how I wanted))
Since the game is from 2006, for the "5_DIRECTX.PNG", it could have been better to put DirectX9 and primary surface as the settings.
Thank you for your reply! Strangely enough, when I tried the DirectX9 and primary surface settings initially, that is what was causing an annoying cursor trail of black lines. Someone else using DxWnd for Nancy Drew posted to Reddit saying she had better luck using D3D9 and that ended up fixing my issues as well.
Last edit: Julia Delightly 2024-04-26
I apologize for the really steep learning curve, also due to the fact that when I started this project about 20 years ago I didn't have the faintest idea about where we would land.
But you can improve a little more your expertise using a more easy and quick way to share your results, that is using the "Export" and "Import ..." menu commands. These commands transfer the whole DxWnd entries to a file with extension .dxw (like "Nancy Drew.dxw") that hold all the parameters that are necessary to replicate the configuration on other computers.
Also, exporting a configuration can be an easy way to back-up results and make more experiments without the risk of not being able to retrieve the previous configurations.
In case, you can always browse the DxWnd help files through the Menu "Help > View help" command.
P.s. export files automatically rip the potentially sensible information like your pathnames. In addition, they are text files and you can easily open them with notepad to make a quick check and be sure that no unwanted information is slipping away!
Last edit: gho 2024-04-26
Thank you very much for all of this information, I will follow these steps to share my results! As far as the learning curve goes, I am just not very experienced with this sort of thing, so I am proud that I figured it out mostly on my own (though I did extensively read through every Help page available, they were so helpful). I did not realize until after the fact that this forum is so active, otherwise I would have reached out for help way sooner and saved myself several hours of confusion haha!
If that works, its all good, but since D3D9 drivers are very diverse from one another, not to mention the DxWnd D3D9 is incomplete, I personally keep it for the last: but hey if it works almost everywhere, there shouldn't be no problem, I guess?
Fixing the primary surface would be an important task
Hello again!
I played through the first game almost entirely with no issues. Suddenly, at the very end of the first game and now with the next one in the series I am trying to play, whenever I click the "Menu" button to save my game, it freezes/crashes/is not responding and must be killed in Task Manager. Do you have an idea of what might be causing this issue? I repaired and uninstalled/reinstalled the game and confirmed it is not an issue when I run the game without the use of DxWnd so I assume it must be a problem in my settings. They have not changed from my original screenshots though so I do not know why it is giving me problems now when it was working fine for over a week.
You can see in this screenshot the only button in the game that is causing this issue is the menu button in the bottom left, which immediately leads to the game freezing and not responding
It would be necessary for us to replicate the problem. If you can locate the savegame files, you may save the game in the last point before the crash, them pack the savegames (in a zip, rar or any other compressed format) and post them here so that we can resume the game from where you left it.
P.s. are we still talking about #14 Danger by Design, is it?
Okay, I tried to compress all of my game files into a zip file and then a .7z but it seems both options are too large to post here. Is there somewhere else I can send them? I did not really get far into the game anyway since I could not save my progress by going into the menu screen. This is also now #15 Creature of Kapu Cave. This problem started right as I was finishing #14 Danger by Design, but since I had completed the story by the time it started giving me problems I did not think anything of it, assuming it to be a one time error. However, when I started the next game the problem persisted.
I don't know if this will help but these two links are where I got the ISO files from to download and install the game:
Disc 1: https://archive.org/details/nancy-drew-the-creature-of-kapu-cave-disc-1
Disc 2: https://archive.org/details/nancy-drew-15-the-creature-of-kapu-cave-2006-her-cd-disc-2-only
You don't have to compress ALL your game files, only the files created to save your progress. Until I don't try the game myself I couldn't tell you exactly which files and where they are located, but I'll try to give you directions as soon as I will get the game.
The savegame files are here:
where of course you should replace <user> with your user name.</user>
Ah, nevermind, I found it!
Last edit: Julia Delightly 2024-05-06
Good. I got your files and merged them with my configuration, it worked! Now, Nancy is somewhere lost in the jungle. Can you suggest me the actions that lead you to the crash?
Last edit: gho 2024-05-06
Whenever I click the menu button in the bottom left corner, the game immediately freezes and stops responding
This is strange, because the very same game (got from where you got it) and run with DxWnd (I suppose the same version that I have) here is working without any problem, and so it was on your computer since what?
I can imagine two possible scenarios:
1) your system has some problem with this game in that particular "spot". In this case I would need some logs to see what happens, but honestly this seems a difficult and unlikely case.
2) something got accidentally corrupted in your game installation. Fortunately your savegames are sane (I can load and run them), so in this case you could keep the savegames in a safe place (your post here can do), uninstall the game, reinstall it and copy over your saved savegame files. All this shouldn't take more than 10 minutes, so I think it's worth trying.
Did you happen to apply all of the same settings that I did? Your resolution looks different than mine. However, I did fully uninstall and reinstall the game and it is still giving me this problem.
I tested the settings on Danger by Design again and did not run into issues with the menu button. I also don't have problems with the Creature of Kapu Cave menu button UNLESS I am running it through DxWnd.
It is not any one particular spot in the game, it is any time in the game that I try to click the menu button that it stops responding. I was only able to save my game progress by turning off my second monitor to play the game without DxWnd, but the point of using DxWnd is so that I do not have to lose my second monitor while playing.
I came to this game now and my result was: the button does NOTHING! It doesn't even open up a menu. I am smelling some configuration issue, I will try to check the game in a raw position.
But let's verify, you want to play this game on your dual monitors on fullscreen, right?
Op was running in fullscreen, and not in windowed mode as in your screenshot, they uploaded their settings in the first post
Last edit: BEEN_Nath_58 2024-05-07
Okay got it, now lets take some steps back. It seems to be in the Main tab!
I got the issue: it is "RUN IN WINDOW" vs "Hide desktop Bg"
Try disabling it, and see if it helps your case. Also you can set the Launch field empty, it was meant for cases where the game had to be launched from Launchers and may cause timing issues generally.
Last edit: BEEN_Nath_58 2024-05-07
If I disable "Run in Window" it breaks the whole thing and crashes immediately, I nearly had to restart my computer because I could not even pull up Task Manager until it crashed fully hahah
OH I see, when I disable "hide desktop bg" that does seem to fix it!! Thank you, though it is a bummer because I like hiding the rest of the desktop while I play
There is a program in dxwnd folder named blacker.exe for the same purpose, See if it works out for you