Bobblen

The movies for this particular game are non-trivial to fix, Silent wrote a fascinating blog post about how they debugged and rewrote the movie player https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2018/05/18/fixing-the-godfather/ https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2018/05/18/fixing-the-godfather-pt2/ Are you already using silent patch? It won't help with windowing but it sorts out the movies and some stability issues.

I'm a big fan of the Strike series, I finished all three on the Mega Drive back in the day. The PC got some of them. Desert & Jungle got DOS releases with an extra level in both games, Urban and Soviet were skipped, and then we surprisingly got this one for Windows. I only ever played a demo of it at the time, it'll be interesting to see how it holds up now!

Thanks for looking, I still get the long load issue with your config. Makes me think it's something about accessing the physical cd that this particular game doesn't like and maybe I'd be better off finding it 'elsewhere'. It works fine with ripped audio files, there's only 3 music tracks anyway and apparently no copy protection related to the track lengths.

It does in fact work, it just has weirdly long load times where the game becomes completely unresponsive. First on startup, then any time you switch between menus and play. Like it's a good 10 to 15 seconds where the game just freezes up, which on a 2020s PC is crazy. Oh well, it works well enough to test out at least. Be sure to set vsync on or it runs at 100 mph!

I've just discovered another one of these. NBA Action 98 (Sega again) has an EXE called winclean.exe which calls frontend.dll to start the game. Presumably it then calls main.dll to actually start play, but I can't get it to do anything with any of the modern PC wrappers so I don't know. I'll probably end up here with another thread, but I like to try everything I can think of before I go down that road again!

I'll regression test with my pile of Sega PC cds, don't all the icons look pretty in the DxWnd window :-D

Very well done sir! Another fine addition to my DxWnd Sega PC collection. Well maybe not fine, it's a rubbish game, but finally the windows version can be documented! :D. There is indeed an issue with the cd check before a race, it only works with 'no cd audio emulation', any other option (including 'play from cd') triggers a disc check which fails. And that's even with my actual disc in the drive. An issue that seems to be affecting me but not @huh is that about 50% of the time, starting a race...

Thanks so much @ghotik, I was ready to give up on that one completely, and yet here it is, loading up in my preferred dxwnd 640x480 window! :-D It seems that video settings are never saved so you can improve things a bit by going into video config and bumping up to 640x480 16 million colours, but yeah, it's an ugly game, and the windows port does not improve things over DOS! I've also noticed it crashes if you try to quit from the main menu. Alt-F4 or going to the menu bar and quitting are fine....