INFO: Common graphic problems with XWA

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Re: INFO: Common graphic problems with XWA

Sknks
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Post by Sknks » Fri Aug 23, 2013 11:59 am

Reimar wrote:
Nyine wrote:I have tried the latest version of xwahacker (once again, thanks a lot for it) in X-Wing, Tie-Fighter and XvT and for some reason in Windows 8 it doesn't solve the disappearing objects. Well, it's not that they disappear, it's that they don't appear at all :lachtot:

I've read that usually the objects appear and when they enter in your view they disappear but this is not the case. It's like if they were invisible all the time. I wonder if this is a known issue and if there is a workaround for it. :hilfe:
Well, an obvious first step would be to figure out what made XWA work. The 32 bit patch or the fixedclear one.
If it's the 32 bit one then the answer is probably "they broken 16 bit rendering and I doubt anyone will bother to implement a work-around".
If the fixedclear one fixed XWA then I have no explanation why the other games aren't working with it. Though it might be worth investigating why your first try of getting XWA to work didn't work out, maybe that would help you find the cause.
From what I've found 16 bit rendering is no longer supported on Windows 8. It works in software mode as the OS converts it on the fly to 32 bit. However it's conversion obviously breaks the 3D hardware mode unfortunately.

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Post by Rothbard » Tue Aug 27, 2013 12:39 pm

Hello, I am having the same problem as the fellow posted a while back with the "warp speed" graphics distortion in XWA (all the graphics "streaming" in from the upper left corner of the screen). I have tried the basic suggestions I have found here and around the net, and nothing seems to be working. I am running windows XP SP3 with a nvidia geforce 8400 GS. XWAHacker doesn't seem to help anything, 16 bit mode, 32 bit mode, or the "fixedclear" file. I have installed the game, patched to 2.02, and installed Darksabers UCP. Any ideas? I suppose I could try reinstalling and using the XWA upgrade, but I doubt that would make much difference in the way things are rendered.

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Post by Rothbard » Thu Aug 29, 2013 9:39 am

Reposting here, since posting on the sticky thread has garnered no response...

Hello, I am having the same problem as the fellow posted a while back with the "warp speed" graphics distortion in XWA (all the graphics "streaming" in from the upper left corner of the screen). I have tried the basic suggestions I have found here and around the net, and nothing seems to be working. I am running windows XP SP3 with a nvidia geforce 8400 GS. XWAHacker doesn't seem to help anything, 16 bit mode or 32 bit mode. I have installed the game, patched to 2.02, and installed Darksabers UCP. Any ideas? I suppose I could try reinstalling and using the XWA upgrade, but I doubt that would make much difference in the way things are rendered.

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Post by Darksaber » Thu Aug 29, 2013 12:03 pm

Don't be so impatient! People have lost interest in the XWAUP, so not many people post here anymore, but your problem stems from your Nvidia card and it's drivers, XWA has never liked Nvidia, if your read though this entire thread you'll probably find your answer.
“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.”
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Post by Reimar » Thu Aug 29, 2013 6:16 pm

As mentioned before current NVidia drivers on Windows XP no longer support older games, full stop. This will not be fixed (official nVidia answer).
Using older drivers or switching to Windows 7 supposedly works (I'd love to recommend switching to Linux+Wine, but while graphics work great it is instead fairly broken on the input side, and without a lot of fiddling will at least not work for the singleplayer mission).
XP in a VirtualBox VM with 3D acceleration enabled might possibly work, too, but I did not get around to testing it myself so far.

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Post by MacbethAUT » Fri Aug 30, 2013 8:30 pm

Greetings, after a few hours trying on my own I gave up and hope you guys can help me here.
I am running Win7 64bit with an AMD HD6970.
I was able to install XWA just fine (with the modified msi) and applied the patch aswell as the DSUCPv2.1 patch.

Now to the problem, I was able to start the game just fine and even fly missions but only in software mode. Nothing I tried so far enabled the 3D mode.
Things I did:

using a differn ddraw.dll version in system32 (ddraw_(hack_viewport3_clear2) - with restart of course) did nothing
using XWAhacker 32bit bat - did nothing.

Any idea what else I might try?

This was one of my most favorite games and I just found my discs again and wanted to give it a ride.
Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to offer :-)

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Post by WildstarBlue9 » Sat Aug 31, 2013 4:11 pm

MacbethAUT, I mentioned this in another thread...assuming you're running nVidia video, try uninstalling your driver and software and reinstall the same driver, but with the Catalyst software from 2010. A user on another forum site reported that to work.
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Post by MacbethAUT » Sat Aug 31, 2013 5:29 pm

Hm, so I might have luck getting it running with an old driver? Well worth a shot. Thanks I'll try that.

EDIT:
Well no luck tried 2 different drivers from 2010 but still couldn't get 3d acceleration working. :-/
Dang, gotta wait for Star Citizen now.

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Post by Reimar » Sun Sep 01, 2013 11:32 am

Since it still works for me I don't really have any proper explanation.
However by the kind of things I have seen lately I am starting to suspect the monitors.
There seem to be more and more that (despite it being required) claim to no longer support standard resolutions like 640x480.
This is just a wild guess and there's a good chance I am wrong, but it might be worth trying a different (old) monitor or a different way of connecting it, just in case.

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Post by WildstarBlue9 » Sun Sep 01, 2013 3:12 pm

MacbethAUT, I didn't say the driver, I said the Catalyst Control Panel software, which is separate (and only works for ATI, not nVidia, as I found on Google). You can get the 10.6 version for 64-bit Windows here (I think the current version is 13.4, so you'd be running an older version w/ this).
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Post by MacbethAUT » Sun Sep 01, 2013 8:33 pm

Oi, okay gotta try that. Thanks for the link.

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Post by Rothbard » Thu Sep 05, 2013 3:46 am

I really appreciate the help given here. I ended up upgrading to windows 7 and that is allowing me to play.

One problem: I can't seem to increase the resolution beyond 640x480. I can set it all the way up to 1280x1024, but when the mission loads it stays in 640x480.

Also the sound gets to be "crackly" in battle and skips a bit generally. Should I reduce my channels ingame?

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Post by Reimar » Thu Sep 05, 2013 6:54 pm

Rothbard wrote: One problem: I can't seem to increase the resolution beyond 640x480. I can set it all the way up to 1280x1024, but when the mission loads it stays in 640x480.
Strange, but maybe your system doesn't allow/advertise the other modes?
You can always try using xwahacker to force it to use the mode that was 800x600 originally (force800mode.bat) and then replace it with whatever resolution you like (changeres.bat).
Rothbard wrote:Also the sound gets to be "crackly" in battle and skips a bit generally. Should I reduce my channels ingame?
Never tried it myself, but there were rumors it is caused by multicore CPUs. You could try setting the "affinity" to make it use only one core. This is possible via the task manager, via starting it with e.g. "start /affinity 1 xwingalliance.exe" or some special tools (the names of which I forgot).
If anyone knows that this actually works please tell me. There might be some ways to integrate this into xwahacker.

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Post by Austrianvespaguy » Fri Sep 06, 2013 2:54 pm

MacbethAUT wrote: Now to the problem, I was able to start the game just fine and even fly missions but only in software mode. Nothing I tried so far enabled the 3D mode.
Hi MacbethAUT, were you able to get it to work? I had the same problem, but the way I solved it was to run ATI's complete uninstall utility which wiped out all of their drivers, and then from the control panel I let Windows find/update the display driver. It found/installed version 8.911.0.0 from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc and it seems to be working great! (My card is a 6850 btw). Anyway, I've since downloaded the Catalyst CC version 10.11 so that I can get Eyefinity working but I haven't touched the driver since it's working at the moment. Anyway, just thought I'd share if you're still stuck. Sucks though that while they've worked for years, the newest ATI drivers son't seem to work with XWA anymore. Maybe this will be fixed with the next update, but I'm worried, so I think I'm going to try and find/keep a stand-alone copy of this driver just in case for the future!

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Post by WolfMax » Wed Oct 09, 2013 2:37 pm

Hi All
I recently installed XWA on a Windows 7 setup with ATI Radeon HD6970. It failed to run correctly and I tried all the XWAhacker fixes (32bit mode, Fix clear, Change Res) but nothing worked except software mode at 640x480. Then I uninstalled the driver and let windows find a 'compatable' driver and it installed ver.8.850 and it now works with the 3D hardware option. The only issue I have now is it used to crash me to desktop if I use res above 1020x768 (I say used to, when I just tried to crash it to record the error message, it wouldn't and I got it to run at 1600x1200! Go figure).
I did replace the DDraw.dll in System32 directory but it has caused an issue with my sound card so I'm reinstalling DirectX11.
I'll let you know how I get on.

Cheers

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Post by WolfMax » Wed Oct 09, 2013 6:57 pm

Right. To add to my post above, I restored the DDraw.dll file I had originally and I could still play the game (I even changed the resolution to 1920x1080 in place of 1600x1200 using XWAhacker) what I forgot to put in the above was I used a DDraw fix program i found here: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/window ... _in_game_x
I'm not sure if this fixed it as after running it, it was still crashing but then stopped so who knows it might have been the difference. What I can say with absolute certainty is downgrading the Graphics driver is what got me the 3d option working. I just reinstalled the latest ATI Catalyst driver and can now only get Software based graphics at 640x480 to work. Seems I'm going to have to run XWA in a virtual machine as I need the latest driver for Battlefield 4 Beta (and most of my other games on my PC). Oh well.

Cheers

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Post by WolfMax » Sun Oct 13, 2013 10:17 pm

Ok quick update.
The highest non BETA version of the ATI Catalyst driver suite that I got to work with XWA on windows 7 is 13.1. Versions .2 and .3 were Betas so I didn't test them The next production version .4 doesn't work (you get the dreaded red box 'switching to software' message).

If i had to guess why the latest ones don't work, it would have to be because they are designed for DirectX 11 which has a backwards compatability requirement as far as DirectX 9. Where as the earlier versions are for DirectX 10 which has a backwards compatability requirement as far as DirectX 8.
The odd thing is, the version of DirectX you have installed isn't the deciding factor (I have 11 installed). Apparently it is the hardware drivers that determine what level of DirectX can be used. So the latest versions don't have the hardware driver required for DirectX 8 as it is no longer the minimum compatability level AMD have to conform to, to say their driver is a DirectX 11 driver :(

So what does all this mean? Well, if you want to run XWA Upgrade on a Windows 7 PC with an ATI card, you will ether have to live with earlier drivers and run the risk of the latest games not working 'cos they need the latest ones or you build a seperate PC for XWA Upgrade and anything else that might need DirectX 8. :kopfwand:

Unless someone here upgrades the upgrade for DirectX 11! :D
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Post by Reimar » Wed Oct 16, 2013 11:32 pm

I don't think the DirectX10/11 compatibility levels are relevant, also since XWA is DirectX6, not 8.
I would guess that either AMD got tired of supporting ancient DirectX versions or (almost as likely) they haven't done proper QA again and didn't even notice they broke it.
Either way I suspect the chances of them fixing it are slim, so my personal solution was to give up on Windows since I didn't even manage to find out why exactly it fails with newer drivers.
The newest xwahacker release includes linux binaries and you can use that release to modify XWA to work (as far as I could tell) flawlessly under Wine in a standard Linux installation.
However it's by far not as user-friendly as on Windows, but maybe a few people here are adventurous enough to give it a try. I'll try to help with any XWA/xwahacker specific issues if you do.

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Post by heloguy » Sun Oct 20, 2013 1:01 am

This is wierd...so I've been using Reimar's patches for a long time, and have had installs that I've just kept saved for my various campaigns that I play (TFTC, XWC, etc.), but finally got to the end of TFTC today, and wanted to install battles 8-13. Unfortunately, I copied over my xwingalliance.exe when I installed it, and totally screwed up my TFTC install.

Now, I'm trying to do a vanilla (if you can call it that) TFTC install, and whenever I try to use the changeres.bat to change to my native res of 1400x900, the game will crash when I try to load up a flight (I get the windows error noise, and a black screen, with ERROR in the task manager). I've tried putting the new res in all four slots, and multiple times in the 800x600 slot both using, and not using the force 800 mode batch file. If I switch all back to stock, with just fixedclear.bat and 32-bit mode, everything runs as advertised.

I must be forgetting something, as my other installs run fine in 1400x900, but I just can't remember how I got them to work that way...

Edit: I was able to get 1400x900 to work with the hex edit instructions on this page:

http://www.wsgf.org/dr/star-wars-x-wing-alliance

Just weird that the changeres.bat quit working for me.
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Post by Reimar » Sun Oct 20, 2013 11:20 am

Have you been using the same xwahacker version as before?
The new versions (and actually all available on sourceforge) will also try to adjust the field-of-view and HUD sizes. I haven't seen that cause issues, but I guess it's not impossible...
Apart from that, xwahacker/changeres should be doing exactly the same things as these manual instructions.
If you redownload (I changed it) xwahacker-2.3 from sourceforge, and edit changres.bat to change this line:
xwahacker xwingalliance.exe -r %res% %xres% %yres%
to this:
xwahacker xwingalliance.exe -r %res% %xres% %yres% k k
it should do exactly what your manual edit did, no more no less.
You could even compare the binaries to verify that.
I'd be interested in knowing if this makes a difference.

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Post by heloguy » Sun Oct 20, 2013 1:37 pm

Thanks for the reply Reimar. I apparently wasn't using the newest version, and after getting 2.3 from SourceForge, it worked fine. I just made a backup copy of xwingalliance.exe, changed 1152x864 back to its original setting, then back to 1440x900 with the version 2.3 changeres.bat. Everything worked fine this time, without the edit you mentioned. Thanks again.
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Post by Avarice1987 » Mon Dec 02, 2013 5:23 am

Hello all,

i have a new pc ( Win 7 64 Bit) and i have a question.

how can i fix the resolution from the standard resolution to my maximum resolution? ( 133*768)

On my old Pc, i have first double click on xwa hacker, second 32 bit exe and last on the fixed clear.

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Post by sw_dm » Sun Dec 29, 2013 3:03 am

Finally!!! I got XWA working. I had been reading posts, down loading fixes, and failing.

My system AMD X4 3.4GHz. 6 GB RAM. WINDOWS 7 64 BIT. ATI Radeon HD5700 1GB.

I order to get it flying at 1280 x 1024, 3d hardware enabled, I needed 3 thing (but tried about 20 for many hours.)

1. Install on 64 bit machine fix. I struggled to understand direction, but with perseverance, I succeded.

http://www.markusegger.at/Software/Game ... tions.html

2. Got game to run but only in 640 x 480 until I did this fix. Allows 3d hardware acceleration. Roll back Catalyst ATI drivers. I read, but do not know myself, that its an Open GL problem. You want old version 10.6 hidden in small text.

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/18 ... -7-64-bit/

3. Got game to run at any resolution, but cockpit frame would make ships and stations disappear. A direct draww .dll file needed to be place in the x-wing alliance directory. C:\Program Files (x86)\LucasArts\X-Wing Alliance.

I played with XWAHACKER for hours. I could get my resolution to change but got a split screen and pink instead of grey, unplayable. As of now I am not using anything from XWAHACKER. I have read many, many posts where it is praised. Did not work for me.

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Post by Reimar » Sun Dec 29, 2013 11:03 pm

sw_dm wrote:I played with XWAHACKER for hours. I could get my resolution to change but got a split screen and pink instead of grey, unplayable. As of now I am not using anything from XWAHACKER. I have read many, many posts where it is praised. Did not work for me.
This should (most likely) mean two things
1) You used the 32 bit mode patch. It might be better to try that only very last
2) You are still using software mode, not 3D acceleration. 32 bit mode will basically break most things that are not rendered in 3D.

Note that 10.6 driver also is rather ancient, the one from beginning of this year (2013) should still work fine, more readily available and more compatible with current games.

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Post by koolio » Wed Feb 05, 2014 11:59 pm

After years of pain and anguish I finally got it working on an ATI Radeon 5100 using Reimars xwahacker. I wanted to thank you so much for making this.

Are Radeon cards generally better than the NVidia cards for the X=Wing series?

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