Original 1997 Timeshock on Windows 8

To be the first of the new ULTRA Editions

Original 1997 Timeshock on Windows 8

Postby Lio » Mon Apr 21, 2014 12:24 pm

I read about isses with the original game in a few individual threads (choppy fps in windows 8) and thought I'd share my current solution to the problem.
It seems that in Win8 "Direct Draw" has ben depreciated and support for it is really poor as a result.
There are a few projects out there that attempt to fix this by providing wrapper dlls of ddraw.dll - I tried a few of them but so far only one provided good results on my system which is this one:
https://github.com/jarikomppa/dxwrapper
(Download the binary package http://iki.fi/sol/zip/dxwrapper20130524.zip and extract the contents into the same folder your timeshock!.exe resides in.)

Ironically it's not even supposed to do anything other than create a log file of the ddraw calls and then pass it on to DirectX.
"DirectX 1-7 wrapper project for making old games run on new hardware. This code is only a "pass-through" wrapper, which can be used as boilerplate for actual fixes (or a dx->opengl wrapper or whatnot).
The wrapper is a full pass-through wrapper; it doesn't do anything special, just takes in calls from the application, writes the event to a log, and passes the arguments to the real DirectX."

So this is not ideal from a player's perspective as you end up with a fast growing log file in the TS directory which you will want to delete afterwards but somehow it solves (almost) all my problems in TS (in order to get the best results I have to disable page-flipping in the TS video options and just to be sure I also created a nvidia driver profile for Timeshock that forces v-sync off for the game).
It's still not entirely smooth all of the time which I think might be a result of the video options test screen in TS suggestion that it has detected 72hz refresh rate while my screen actually runs at 60hz.


I have tried a few more possible fixes that did not solve my problems but might be worth a try on other machines:

1. Disable direct draw hardware acceleration:
Add the following string value (with the correct path to your game executable) to your registry in order to disable direct draw hardware acceleration for the game (my result is good performance but tons of visual errors)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]
"C:\Games\Timeshock!.exe"="$ DWM8And16BitMitigation Layer_ForceDirectDrawEmulation"

2. Try a different wrapper such as:
ddwarpper: http://bitpatch.com/ddwrapper.html (works but performance does not improve for me)
DDHack: https://code.google.com/p/ddhack/ (does not work for me at all)
DXGL: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=33134 (haven't actually tried it myself)
WineD3D: http://www.nongnu.org/wined3d/ (works but the game acts funny, slows down and as soon as the ball enters the crystal it never comes out again)
-> go to the old version directory 1.1.38 (the most recent one does not contain ddraw.dll) and grab: http://nongnu.mirrors.hostinginnederlan ... ined3d.exe
HOWEVER do NOT run wined3d.exe but extract the contents of it with a tool like 7zip to a temp folder and copy "ddraw.dll", "libwine.dll" and "wined3d.dll" from \$SYSDIR\ to your Timeshock! installation folder.

If you have found other wrappers or solutions that work please share!
Your mother ate my dog! :-)
User avatar
Lio
VIP Tester
VIP Tester
 
Posts: 88
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:35 pm

Re: Original 1997 Timeshock on Windows 8

Postby Lio » Mon Apr 21, 2014 1:38 pm

I guess I could have saved myself a lot of trouble had I read this here to the end:
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16
hasenpuschel's hint about running the executable in xp sp3 compatibility mode with reduced colour mode: 16-bit and disabling display scaling on high DPI settings works just as well, probably even better.
Just had to make sure to adjust the color depth in game to 65.000 as well and make sure screen slipping is turned off.
Not 100% perfect but still the best solution I've come across.
Your mother ate my dog! :-)
User avatar
Lio
VIP Tester
VIP Tester
 
Posts: 88
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:35 pm

Re: Original 1997 Timeshock on Windows 8

Postby Nochwas » Thu May 25, 2017 4:42 pm

I disabled the first item in the "graphics"-settings menu. I set the display-buffering to "disabled". That did the job for me. After that, the pinball runs smooth across the display again.
Nochwas
New Member
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 10:30 am


Return to Timeshock!

cron