Blarg

[Dr Unne]

I want to play Warcraft 2. I have Windows XP Professional and a Voodoo3 video card. Warcraft 1 works perfectly. War2 however loads perfectly except that the video is completely garbled. The opening movie plays OK, then the display is pure trash. I know the game is running, because I can start it by clicking randomly. The soundcard even works. I would've thought the soundcard would've given me problems if anything.

3dfx went out of business recently. But they do have a 3rd-party Voodoo3 driver on their site written by some hackers, which I tried. War2 didn't work. So I tried the crappier driver that Windows XP published themselves. Still doesn't work. I think my card is too new for War2 to recognize, since it's such an old game, and for DOS. War2 comes with a video setup program called UVCONFIG.EXE. The option to pick a "RAM DAC ID" lists old cards like Trident and such. The amount of memory they give you to choose from starts at 256k and goes up to 8MB, that ought to tell you how old the game is. There are three other options, "Ignore old VBE BIOS", "Disable VBE 2.0 extensions", and "Disable linear framebuffer". No idea what any of those mean, or if using them in some combination might help me. UVCONFIG crashes no matter what options I choose. Well I'm not sure if it crashes, but when it tries to test itself, my monitor gives me a "Scan out of range" message or something and the program dies.

I've tried running Windows XP in those stupid compatibility modes, they didn't help. I think if I remember correctly that War2 worked when I had Windows 95/98/ME before I installed XP. Not sure about that though.

I thought maybe I could use a VESA or SuperVGA emulator to make War2 think I was using a different video card, but I have no idea if such things exist, let alone how to use them. I don't even know too well what VESA means. I don't know much about video cards. I even considered trying to play War2 in Wine on Linux, but I didn't even come close to getting that to work at all.

I don't really expect too much help, but who knows. Couldn't hurt to ask.

[Spuuky]

You tried the compatibility modes? And it didn't work? Hmm... There are some programs that XP, irritatingly, doesn't support. Period. However... I had an issue like this, with a different game (Heroes of Might and Magic 2). I eventually got it to work by updating the game itself (apparently a patch had been released I wasn't aware of), running in Windows 95 compatibility mode, and disabling visual themes. For some reason, the disabling visual themes made a difference. You coudl also try getting a different version of DirectX, I think WC2 uses that. DirectX can be troublesome...

I'm not sure about the settings. Scan out of range in the monitor usually has to do with the refresh rate, I'm not sure how that connects to this.

How exactly is the video messed up? I'm not sure what "garbled" means in this instance.

And considering that it is a video problem, if WC2 expects a certain version of DirectX, that's my bet.

[Dr Unne]

Warcraft 2 is entirely a DOS game. Not for Windows at all. It was released when Windows 95 was around I think. Before Windows 98 even. I don't thin it uses DirectX. It seems to use its own weird engine or something. It doesn't even use DOS4GW. Most DOS games older than WAR2 work fine for me. Most newer ones too. War2 is special for some reason. If it was a DirectX problem though, I'd have to downgrade or something, wouldn't I? I don't think I want to do that.

I looked for a possible patch for the game, but I only found one, and it was an old patch that had to do with networking, not with sound cards. I don't think people care enough about the game any longer to bother patching it, if anyone else even has this problem.

The video is "garbled" in that it displays something kind of like the game, only in super-low resolution (say, 320x240 or lower, it's hard to tell), and it displays vertical lines of "game" and pure black that kind of alternate across the monitor. The lines of video it does display are corrupt. When I move the mouse around, sometimes for a second or so I see some flickring color-changes, but it's nothing even resembling the game. Most of the game is displayed "off" the screen, if that makes sense. It's like if you took a screenshot of a sixteenth of the game screen and ran it through a scrambler and put it on my monitor.

I either get that, or I get the game displaying (almost) normally, but it only displays a little part of the game screen, 8 or 10 times in almost random places across my monitor. When I move my mouse, about half of those little sub-screens display a mouse cursor moving, and moving the mouse eventually just corrupts the whole display. I tried taking a screenshot, but Warcraft 2 refuses to be run in a Window, so I can't Printscreen or Mark-Copy the screen.

I tried Windows 95 mode with themes disabled, and tried 256 color mode and 640x480 mode too. That didn't work.

Blah. I'm going to start screwing with the .ini file.

[Squally Leonharty]

Hmm... You said it was a DOS game? XP doesn't like DOS stuff anymore. :p You'll have to boot in real DOS mode, instead of XP's Command Prompt.

To do that, create a Win98 Boot Disk, then boot into DOS and run the game from there. Should work. ;)

[Spuuky]

You could try adjusting your desktop resolution before running the game.

I've currently only got Warcraft and Warcraft 3, or I'd test on my system, which is running XP, as well.

Is there a difference in running the game from the command prompt (in full screen mode) vs. running it directly from Windows?

I suppse you could try turning down your Hardware Acceleration. It might make a difference, and doesn't hurt to try.

Squally: That could work, but why should it matter, since Warcraft works? It's an even older DOS-only game.

[crono_logical]

If you get such a "recent" DOS games working well under XP, then well done, I can't even get Doom2 working under XP on my PC at a decent speed, that plays at like 20% the normal speed or something :p It's because DOS is emulated under XP and doesn't really exist, so many of the things these older games expect to have are no longer supported.

One of the reasons why a dual boot sytem between XP and an older version of Windows may be useful :)

[Endless]

I ran a copy I found on the net (my cd is at my dad's), and noticed two things:

- It works fine with my voodoo3 2000
- It uses dos4gw :p

I'm running win98, so I'm taking that it's XP's fault entirely. The lack of backward compatibility is one of the reason why I'm keeping 98. :p

[Squally Leonharty]

Just wondering, but what exactly is dos4gw and what does it do? O_o

[crono_logical]

As far as I know, it enables things for DOS games running under Win95/98/ME, though what exactly it deos I don't know, I've only noticed that many DOS games I have use that program under Windows too :p

[Dr Unne]

dos4gw is used for some DOS games running under DOS too. It's some sort of driver or something, I have no idea. A lot of old games I had for DOS 5.0 used dos4gw, that was before I even had Windows.

Master Vivi: I found that same copy for download too, it does use dos4gw. But my copy off of my CD doesn't. Weird. The copy I downloaded doesn't work either though. What settings did you pick in that UVCONFIG program for your sound card?

Spuuky: Running from Windows or the command prompt doesn't really make a difference in XP, since the command prompt isn't even a real command prompt, it's just some sort of dumb DOS emulator to fool us into thinking XP has DOS. I'll try turning down hardware acceleration I guess.

I've tried changing resolutions before opening the game, that doesn't work either. I'd really really hate to dual-boot Windows 98 just to play Warcraft 2. I guess booting to DOS is the only thing I can try. I wanted to avoid that too though, since I'm going to have to hunt down DOS drivers for my CDROM and sound card now. Darn it. And I guess I'm going to have to hunt down a copy of DOS, I don't have one.

Darn it, how the heck do you change hardware acceleration in XP? Why the heck does Microsoft have to move everything around all the time?

[Spuuky]

Right click on desktop, Properties, Settings, Advanced, Troubleshoot.

[Dr Unne]

Didn't work either. Not that I expected it to. *gives up*

[Endless]

I didn't configure anything. Just hit war2.exe, and it ran, with the mouse and the sound okay, and I started a game and it worked too.

*Checks*

It autodetected a blank chipset name, 256kb, normal 8 bit dac.
I changed 256kb to 8 mb and it worked too.