Practical necromancy on the example of the game Gulf War: Operation Desert Hammer (1999)
Good to everyone!
It all started with a closet with old games. About 10 years ago he took a game from a friend, put it in the nightstand and remembered it 10 years later. I wondered what kind of game this was, unknown to me. It turned out that this is a tank arcade of 1999, from the firm 3DO, about the adventures of a super-American tank during the Gulf War.
Googling and YouTube showed that little is known about the game. One review on our site and one on foreign.
Requirements from readme.txt
Windows 95/98, Pentium 166 / 32M Ram / 150M Hard Drive space / 4x CD-ROM / Direct X 6.1 / Microsoft Compatible Mouse
I tried to put it under Windows 7 x86 / x64 - black screen, crash and silence. Under XP SP3 is the same. Compatibility games did not help.
After playing virtuals decided that everything is sad. DOSBOX svn daum with the Glide emulator and WIndows98SE IF under it were very, very sad. And I was sad. As a result, I spent a week on various settings. As a result, once for 10 seconds, I managed to start the game in Glide mode, managed to record a video and once again the dosbox crashes. Soft mode managed to run through VirtualPC 2007 and Windows 98 . There were some problems with the mouse, it was unplayable, I wanted it from the sports interest of Glide / D3D.
')
I decided to try to figure it out, all of a sudden everything is not so bad and this unwillingness to work on NT systems is caused only by human factors. I already knew two cases of such a disgrace - this is the strategy of Myth2 with the inscription at launch “give at least 32 MB of RAM”, but it was perfectly running as a result of 16 MB of RAM and Descent Freespace with the same problem.
A patch was made on the launch (exe hacked from the initial protection, pirated), the compatibility mode with “Windows 98 / Windows ME” was set and the game started on Win7 x86 / x64, having previously issued the inscription “Gulf War is only for Win95. Not NT. ”
In software mode, you can change the drawing distance in a wider range (20-600) than in the settings (70-300).
With a drawing distance of 20, nothing is visible at all, the enemies can be seen literally driving up to them a couple of meters, pure hardcore and Silent Hill, and at the maximum range you can see the entire map at once)))
File \ settings \ settings.cfg
offset 0x0C and 0x0D, low byte goes first at 0x0C.
The minimum for the software mode is 20. It turns out a clean Silent Hill.
Maximum for software mode - 600.
Exceeding the range value tears all patterns. Glide - 350
Direct3D with boost to 350.
And Direct3D - 250 is the maximum possible setting of the game.
Then I started to play with the resolution:
d3d at 1024x768, HUD stayed at 640x480
d3d_r.exe file
It was
0048A5F4 BE 80020000 MOV ESI, 280 (640)
0048A5F9 BA E0010000 MOV EDX, 1E0 (480)
patch on
0048A5F4 BE 00040000 MOV ESI 400 (1024)
0048A5F9 BA 00030000 MOV EDX, 300 (768)
Some files are compressed by the simplest RLE compression, the file is divided into groups of 2 bytes, the first is the number of repetitions of the second byte. The file table contains 2 sizes, compressed and unpacked.
Sources and path on the forum old-games.ru
And in the end I recorded a video on a quite modern computer, under Windows 7 x64, using the Glide-wrapper nglide 1.01
“Gulf War is only designed for Win95. Not NT. ”
Myth Busted!
It all started with a closet with old games. About 10 years ago he took a game from a friend, put it in the nightstand and remembered it 10 years later. I wondered what kind of game this was, unknown to me. It turned out that this is a tank arcade of 1999, from the firm 3DO, about the adventures of a super-American tank during the Gulf War.
Googling and YouTube showed that little is known about the game. One review on our site and one on foreign.
Requirements from readme.txt
Windows 95/98, Pentium 166 / 32M Ram / 150M Hard Drive space / 4x CD-ROM / Direct X 6.1 / Microsoft Compatible Mouse
I tried to put it under Windows 7 x86 / x64 - black screen, crash and silence. Under XP SP3 is the same. Compatibility games did not help.
After playing virtuals decided that everything is sad. DOSBOX svn daum with the Glide emulator and WIndows98SE IF under it were very, very sad. And I was sad. As a result, I spent a week on various settings. As a result, once for 10 seconds, I managed to start the game in Glide mode, managed to record a video and once again the dosbox crashes. Soft mode managed to run through VirtualPC 2007 and Windows 98 . There were some problems with the mouse, it was unplayable, I wanted it from the sports interest of Glide / D3D.
')
I decided to try to figure it out, all of a sudden everything is not so bad and this unwillingness to work on NT systems is caused only by human factors. I already knew two cases of such a disgrace - this is the strategy of Myth2 with the inscription at launch “give at least 32 MB of RAM”, but it was perfectly running as a result of 16 MB of RAM and Descent Freespace with the same problem.
A patch was made on the launch (exe hacked from the initial protection, pirated), the compatibility mode with “Windows 98 / Windows ME” was set and the game started on Win7 x86 / x64, having previously issued the inscription “Gulf War is only for Win95. Not NT. ”
In software mode, you can change the drawing distance in a wider range (20-600) than in the settings (70-300).
With a drawing distance of 20, nothing is visible at all, the enemies can be seen literally driving up to them a couple of meters, pure hardcore and Silent Hill, and at the maximum range you can see the entire map at once)))
File \ settings \ settings.cfg
offset 0x0C and 0x0D, low byte goes first at 0x0C.
The minimum for the software mode is 20. It turns out a clean Silent Hill.
Maximum for software mode - 600.
Exceeding the range value tears all patterns. Glide - 350
Direct3D with boost to 350.
And Direct3D - 250 is the maximum possible setting of the game.
Then I started to play with the resolution:
d3d at 1024x768, HUD stayed at 640x480
d3d_r.exe file
It was
0048A5F4 BE 80020000 MOV ESI, 280 (640)
0048A5F9 BA E0010000 MOV EDX, 1E0 (480)
patch on
0048A5F4 BE 00040000 MOV ESI 400 (1024)
0048A5F9 BA 00030000 MOV EDX, 300 (768)
Some files are compressed by the simplest RLE compression, the file is divided into groups of 2 bytes, the first is the number of repetitions of the second byte. The file table contains 2 sizes, compressed and unpacked.
Sources and path on the forum old-games.ru
And in the end I recorded a video on a quite modern computer, under Windows 7 x64, using the Glide-wrapper nglide 1.01
“Gulf War is only designed for Win95. Not NT. ”
Myth Busted!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/170603/
All Articles