dippy dipper

For system emulation are you sure Vmware supports cdaudio? Most virtual machines like VirtualBox do not. The only emulator I know for sure that supports it is PCem.

Analog audio lead from a sound card to an IDE drive on a 64-bit Windows system? Seems unlikely. Since you have the original disc could it be that it is an issue with the optical drive letter? E.g. the game could be searching for the disc in the wrong drive letter. Old games can assume that the system has just one optical drive.

Sorry, but that analog CD aux theory is nonsense. The music is played from the CD probably through the wail32.dll library. There is also evidence that the original disc plays CD audio fine as per this blog: https://thisoldrecliner.neocities.org/pitfall.html Now I don't have the original disc and I assume you are also using cd images downloaded from the net. So in this case any kind of more complex copy protection requires a cracked pitfall.exe. Things are further complicated by the fact that the...

Oh, would you look at that! SourceForges artificial stupidity has eaten my post again.

For example the pixels at co-ordinates: 64-65,56 for the window texture come out as RGB 0,0,0. Flood filling the matching colors with magenta produces a pattern that can be seen in-game. Note that not all textures use the same color for transparent pixels. Look at the staircase column and the comparison to the texture. Also some unintentional holes in the texture? Or maybe the house just has a termite problem. Here the transparent color is RGB 206,203,206. (or CECBCE in hex) I feel like the issue...

Tested on an even older PC just for fun and it showed no transparent pixel issues with or without the "Suppress DX common errors" flag using "v2_05_71_build.rar". It had an integrated ATI graphics card. So the issue seems complicated and highly dependent on GPU and/or it's drivers. P.S. I am still running on Windows 10 version 20H2. I have not yet upgraded to 21H1. Hopefully that makes no difference.

Yes, with “v2_05_71_build.rar” and enabling the "Suppress DX common errors" flag I can see those transparent pixels on the ground textures. However not with the “dxwnd.2.05.72.nocolorkey.rar” test build. I will need to arrange some tests runs on other machines with newer hardware. It may take a while though. In the mean time a compromise could be to not mess with the code and maybe just add a note in the .dxw file for Rainbow6 to try the "Suppress DX common errors" flag if there are issues with transparent...

That "ddraw:ForcesHEL" trick is neat! It results in a fluent gameplay with the software renderer.