INFO: Common graphic problems with XWA

[dag-dabreemie]

I don't know how much time and efforts you've spend on this fix, so I can't just ask you like that (and you've already answered about Jedi Knight).
But you see, I'm sure that there would be many people who'd be ready (I am) to donate to see you working on fix for other LucasArts titles which have similar problems.
I'm thinking of "Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II" and its addon "Mysteries of the Sith" (same 3D acceleration issues), "Shadows of the Empire" (3D models disappear, leaving only the ground and the sky...), and I surely forget some other titles.

Star Wars Episode 1 Racer PC also no longer visually runs properly in XP ( with the official white screen patch .exe fix ) with Radeon HD series. X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter & Balance of Power has graphics corruption too.
I have all these LucasArts Star Wars games and I definitely am with DarthKaal among everybody else feelin' the pain.

[CesarW]

I downloaded the hacker program and it just quit??? lol...

[Timon Solus]

Reimar's fixedclear.bat installer will just quit saying 'earlier patch not installed' if you have NOT installed official Lucasarts XWA patch v2.02 - done it myself.

After installing XWA, download and install the official Patch to v2.02 before doing anything else - and I mean ANYTHING. (except maybe breathing.)

[Timon Solus]

Thanks very much to Reimar and everyone else who posted in this thread. XWA is running perfectly!

Now, if only the same hex-edit hack worked on X-wing 95 and TIE 95.... Unfortunately, it doesn't - so I'm stuck with running the DOS versions.

[Parksy04]

Reimar, thanks for all the effort you have put in to get this great game working again. I just reinstalled on my new PC which uses Vista Home Premium 32bit and I have an ATI HD 2600XT. I tried running the .bat file you released but I keep getting the message "Could not open file xwingalliance.exe: Permission denied." Do you know how I could find a way around this so I can fix the blank squares problem.
Given my setup (Vista Home Premium 32bit and ATI HD 2600XT), what steps are required to get the game working fully again? That is after I can solve the "permission denied" issue.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Parksy04]

I forgot to mention before, as well as the.bat file getting "permission denied", when I open the xwahacker file it just closes immediately. Is it supposed to do this? Also, I have the 9.3 driver for my graphics card. And when you mention changing those long lines of numbers to other long lines of numbers: how do you do that? Do I need to do it if your files are available? Refer to my above post for the problems I face running your files.
HELP ME PLEASE!

[Timon Solus]

Make absolutely sure you have upgraded XWA to version 2.02 before trying the xwahack or any of the bat file fixes.

The hack won't work otherwise.

[Parksy04]

I have 2.02, but none of files work.

[Reimar]

Now, if only the same hex-edit hack worked on X-wing 95 and TIE 95.... Unfortunately, it doesn't - so I'm stuck with running the DOS versions.

I haven't tested it, but it should be basically the same hexedit that works, I don't think they ever changed the code over all those versions.
I don't have the X-wing/TIE windows versions, but e.g. for some German version of XWing vs. TIE the change would be something like this:
in Z_XVT__.EXE at position 0xb5e2b change the values from
50 68 00 00 00 03 6a 00 6a 00 6a 00 a1 cc ee 64 00 50 a1 cc ee 64 00 8b 00 ff 50 14
to
6a 00 6a 00 6a 00 6a 02 6a 00 6a 00 a1 44 ee 64 00 50 a1 44 ee 64 00 8b 00 ff 50 50

Unfortunately some of those values will depend on the specific binary...

[Reimar]

but I keep getting the message "Could not open file xwingalliance.exe: Permission denied."

You get that messages because you indeed do not have permission. Search the internet for problems with UAC and how to avoid it.
Normally, just renaming the .bat file to include the string "setup" or "install" should work, but last time I checked Microsoft implemented it stupidly and it would not work for command-line applications.

[Timon Solus]

I haven't tested it, but it should be basically the same hexedit that works, I don't think they ever changed the code over all those versions.
I don't have the X-wing/TIE windows versions, but e.g. for some German version of XWing vs. TIE the change would be something like this:
in Z_XVT__.EXE at position 0xb5e2b change the values from
50 68 00 00 00 03 6a 00 6a 00 6a 00 a1 cc ee 64 00 50 a1 cc ee 64 00 8b 00 ff 50 14
to
6a 00 6a 00 6a 00 6a 02 6a 00 6a 00 a1 44 ee 64 00 50 a1 44 ee 64 00 8b 00 ff 50 50

Unfortunately some of those values will depend on the specific binary...

Reimar, thanks very much for the reply.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'the specific binary' and which values you mean.

Do you mean the position will be different? Or that the actual strings of values will need to be different?

Any chance of you explaining which ones, and what they might need to change to?

Suggestion: If you can't help without the actual exe files to work with, but would be prepared to devise and test a fix for both X-wing 95 and TIE 95 if you did have the files, I would be prepared to buy you an Amazon gift certificate, so you could buy X-wing Collector Series to get the files. You could view it as a thank you for the work! For me it would be well worth the money.

The Collector Series (Windows versions) seems to be available on Amazon.co.uk, but not Amazon.de.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listin ... ition=used

Best regards,
Timon Solus

[Parksy04]

You get that messages because you indeed do not have permission. Search the internet for problems with UAC and how to avoid it.

Thanks a lot for that tip Reimar. It works perfectly now. YAY!!!
You're my hero, Ace

[Reimar]

Do you mean the position will be different? Or that the actual strings of values will need to be different?

Any chance of you explaining which ones, and what they might need to change to?

The position and the values cc ee 64 00 in the original and the values 44 ee 64 00 in the hacked one are almost certainly different. Since the engine seems to be the same, the other bytes are likely the same.
What they need to be changed to is a more difficult question, those values are the places where the game stores the D3D Z-Buffer surface and D3D Viewport respectively, finding them usually involves finding other places where they are used, the easy way is usually to look for a string like "Viewport created successfully." and where that is used in the code, it should be referenced several times above that.
I don't know if you have the experience/motivation to do it, but I can describe the general idea anyway.
Use e.g. http://hte.sf.net , download it, put it in the directory with the binary, start it, use F3 to open the file. Press F7 to search. Enter "Viewport" as search term (possibly check the "case insensitive").
When it found something, press F9 and select "pe/image". You should then see the string (e.g. db "Viewport created successfully.\n\0") and slightly above that something like "xref o4b765e".
Use the cursor keys to navigate to the number right of "xref" and hit enter.
Somewhere (quite a bit) above this you should see several places with code like
mov eax, [?data_64ee44]
mov eax, [eax]
call dword ptr [eax+20h]
The "?data_..." value is the one you need to use in the hack, eax might be something else like edx or so, but the same in all 3 places, and the +20h might be a different value as well (we do not really care here).
(if you care and have the background to understand it, the code gets the pointer to the Viewport object, then gets the first entry in the object which is the so-called vtable (a list with the functions the object offers) and then calls the function at offset 20h which is the (32 / 4 + 1) = 9th function of the object, which would be the Viewport::SetBackground function).

Suggestion: If you can't help without the actual exe files to work with, but would be prepared to devise and test a fix for both X-wing 95 and TIE 95 if you did have the files, I would be prepared to buy you an Amazon gift certificate, so you could buy X-wing Collector Series to get the files. You could view it as a thank you for the work! For me it would be well worth the money.

The Collector Series (Windows versions) seems to be available on Amazon.co.uk, but not Amazon.de.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listin ... ition=used

That's interesting, I wasn't really aware you could still easily get them, even if only used. The original English versions are interesting to me anyway since I always suspected that they messed up the translation a bit in some places.
I'll think about it when I am back home again next week. Too bad I have not been able to make Xwing vs. TIE run at a higher resolution, that makes those games a bit ugly on today's widescreen displays.

[Timon Solus]

Reimar:

Great explanation, thanks - but completely beyond my level of experience (I've only hacked game files to change text characters before!) I'll have a go, but am unlikely to have any clue what I'm doing.

You'd do a far better job than me. If you're interested in my suggestion, send me a PM with your email address, and I'll arrange the Amazon gift certificate for you, as compensation for your time.

[bobafett573]

Hello everyone. I haven't played XWA since I was 12 years old...now I'm 21 and bored with all the current games so I dug through my old games and found XWA. They just don't make quality games like they used to Anyhow, I was struggling all day today to get XWA to work for me but I kept getting those 8x8 blocks...and thanks to you guys I now have fixed the problem. I can't thank you guys enough!

[KrazyTrumpeter05]

Hey all, just wanted to say the fix worked great and now I can play X-Wing alliance with AA and no disappearing textures or any of that nonsense!

I do still have one issue, though. It seems that when I'm in combat firing lasers at a nearby target or if I'm just flying past a large ship or station, my frame rate seems to plummet and the game becomes very choppy. This happened before I applied the fix, too, so I'm hoping it's either an ingame or graphics card setting I can change.

Here's my setup:
Intel Q6600 clocked to 3.2 GHZ
XFX nVidia 9800 GTX Black Edition
4 gigs of 1066 MHZ RAM
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music edition

In-game graphics settings are all on max (hardware accelleration, MIP mapping, the works)
In the nVidia control panel I have forced AA for XWA to 8x and supersampling, everything else is left as default.

If you need any other information from me, let me know!

[WildstarBlue9]

Are you running the latest drivers for your GPU, Trumpeter?

[KrazyTrumpeter05]

Yes indeed, I am. I just updated them a couple days ago. Unless something was released since then...

[Reimar]

Just wanted to say that I updated the attachment on my post from March 12th to include a otherfixes.txt which describes how to fix TIE95, X-Wing95 and X-Wing vs. TIE/Balance of Power.

[KrazyTrumpeter05]

Anyone have any ideas why I get such a poor frame rate despite a MORE than adequate system as detailed in my above post? Would really like to play this game again

[Dragon]

Is your processor a Quadcore?

[KrazyTrumpeter05]

Yes, the Q6600 is a quad core.

[Dragon]

Ok as far as i know, XWA uses only one core and so your PC has only 800 MHZ. That might cause the drop of the frame rate.
Someone correct me, if i'm wrong.

[KrazyTrumpeter05]

?

My processor is clocked at 3.4 ghz, not 800 mhz.

[Dragon]

But XWA uses only one of your four cores, so you have only a quarter of your system performance.