DirectDraw emulation still broken in Windows 10

Okay thank you! I've noticed a lot of 2D MMORPGs have had compatibility issues, too. Would you want information about them, or will the games in this thread suffice for now? If the compatibility issues end up having to be fixed game by game I don't want to add to your team's workload.

Hi,

I work on the Game Compatibility team at Microsoft. A fix was made and confirmed for Swat 3. I confirmed it was playing very slow and now is working. It sounds like this fix did not work with all ddraw games. I have an open issue against Red Alert 2. It plays fine at 640x480 but comes to a crawl higher than that. I will gather the list of games mentioned here and get the appropriate person to investigate. Thanks for posting this issue and being a Windows Insider.

-Kevin

Thanks! I'll take a look at the ones with frame rate issues.

Kevin, thanks for looking into things. I've been researching and can't seem to find any response or update from Microsoft other than your lovely comments and bug report, so I thought it would be best to respond to this thread.

Are there any updates or a potential timeline for a fix for the issue with sprite based/2D/older games? Does it seem to actually be an issue with DirectX (e.g. DirectDraw's deprecation), or is there any knowledge available to share with developers to fix the games on their end?

Is it simply a matter of "these games will never be compatible with Windows 10"? Is there any way we gamers can help solve this? Next time on Dragon Ball Z..

Total Annihilation also performs at greatly reduced frame rates in both Windows 10 and 8.x. It appears Microsoft modified or dropped support for ddraw functions which worked flawlessly in XP, Vista, and Windows 7. 

There are literally hundreds of older gaming communities that rely on programs like Wine or Dxwnd to try and work around the limitations of Win 8-10. A fix for this would immediately prompt me to jump on board to 10, but until then I am quite content to stay on Win 7 as it is far more stable with older software support.

You do not have to waste money buying DX. You can download the DirectX installer (June 2010) for nix from MS.

Reinstalling DX would likely be a waste of time however, because Direct Draw is no longer, and has not been included in the DirectX install for years (Including the outdated DX 9.0c installer).

Download Details - Microsoft Download Center - DirectX Redist (June 2010)

-   I've not used this particular fix, but there is a fix for Direct Draw  -  http://sol.gfxile.net/ddhack/

• Problems with games earlier that 2000 in particular, are not new to Win10. People also had issues with Win7.

It depends on the game. I have several older games that run as well on Win10 as they did on Win7,

but some of those only ran on Win7 because they had fixes available from fan sites

(eg- Grim Fandango - Diablo II).

 - Some old games have an option to use software acceleration or hardware acceleration. Selecting software

acceleration may allow the game to run, but will reduce graphics quality.

• DOS based games require DOS BOX to run (Good old Games has a lot of DOS based games that install

with DOS Box and run well on Win10... so far. ) -

D-Fend Reloaded is a user interface that make DOS Box a bit more user friendly, and includes DOS Box.

D-Fend Reloaded: Overview

• It is interesting that MS advertises Win10 as the best Windows for gaming ever. Yeah! Right.

Worse than the Direct Draw issue (I believe is affects far more people) is the introduction of DRM blocking.

Nothing more than an extortion attempt at getting people to toss out their disk based games and buy

again from download sites, I reckon.

My full rant on DRM blocking  ---- here ----

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