DirectDraw emulation still broken in Windows 10

Anonymous
2015-08-17T12:32:58+00:00

Hello, Microsoft, please fix DirectDraw, considering Windows 10 is your last OS, and loads of people have complained about this in Windows 8, and it's STILL NOT FIXED IN 10. most games DX8 and below run horrible thanks to this, either screwed up colours and/or a very bad framerate to other problems such as sprites not loading. This is odd considering it was fine in Windows 7. 

An example is Red Alert 2, it's unplayable unless you use a 3rd party directdraw emulation such as WineD3D.

Another example is Commandos 3, the graphics are corrupted and it crashes on some missions making it unplayable.

And no compatibility settings don't fix any of this.

All we need is Windows 7's DirectDraw emulation back since that was fine.

Cmon microsoft fix this!

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Gaming

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-02-18T13:23:33+00:00

    Oki, i would like to use win 10, but what preventing me, it's one game, which work perfect up to win 7. From win 8-10 i had a lot trouble to use it on normal way, so to make it short, Kevin: could you look intro Turok 2 Seeds of Evil (use demo if you not have full game, near hands) and you should find that fps is locked on magic ~33 fps, fps limit that showing us, that, something is wrong in core... Game using dx 6.1. Please help me, ty, and of course i, myself, will keep testing to find can some dll or registry key show truth, how to unblock magic fps limiter for many old games, which are plagued on exact same way. Greetings.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-02-18T00:19:35+00:00

    I found out why SimCity 4 behaves even worse than it already do in Win 8 and 10 when running on a laptop with nVidia Optimus, I am not sure if the bug is in nVidia Drivers, Intel Drivers or in DD emulation.

    SimCity 4 queries about the video card using the function IDirectDraw7::GetDeviceIdentifier

    The MSDN page https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/gg426144(v=vs.85).aspx says that if it is called with the flag DDGDI_GETHOSTIDENTIFIER it should return the information about the Host video card, while with the flag "0" it should return the secondary video card.

    SimCity 4 uses the flag 0 (ie: it requests the secondary video card).

    When DirectDraw was made, and GPUs were mostly completely optional separate hardware, the "host" card was whatever came in the motherboard, and the "secondary" was the video card (usually inserted in a PCI/AGP/PCI-E slot).

    With switchable GPU laptops, it is logical to expect that the "host" should be the GPU integrated in the CPU (example: Intel HD 4000 that comes in my i7) whiel the "secondary" card should be the discrete GPU chip.

    SimCity 4 on my machine requests the secondary card, but gets the host anyway... when it attempts to get the host, it also gets the host, meaning that the function GetDeviceIdentifier always return the Intel video.

    I have no idea who is the culprit here, probably it is nVidia (they said around in 2008 or 2009 in press conferences that they had no intention of supporting DirectX 1 to 8)

    But maybe it is a DDraw emulation bug, so I would appreciate if you took a look (even better if you push the fix to Windows 8 too)

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-02-17T23:33:32+00:00

    I'll take a look again at SWAT 3 from GoG. Fix would be in the OS.

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-02-17T23:32:47+00:00

    you give me a game, where you got it from that worked on windows 7 and not windows 10. I'll take a look. 

    Update. I looked at Jagged Alliance and have a bug opened on it. Need to compare to Windows 7 status next.

    Next up. Simcity 4 and Arcanum from gog.com.

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