Thanks gilgamesh. I'll give all that a try and see what happens, doing none of those things by themselves one at a time does nothing, but maybe altogether it might do the trick. I've got a similar card to yours too, the 3870 (POS in my opinion).



lol, I was thinking along the same lines. TFU wasn't too bad until you got to the star destroyer level then it turned to ****. I wish they would come out with a new JK though. I think it still has a serious enough following to generate some serious sales, plus you never know with Lucasarts. They're rumored to be working on another Tie Fighter game. If they are, I'm going to jizz, in my pants over 9000 times on a boat.

Man, now my "target audience" for TODOA has diminished from "bunch of geeks still playing a 30-year-old video game" to "two geeks with really old machines that can run a 30-year-old video game properly". Not to mention working on it has gone 8 x slower now that my GF8600GT died. ... Hmm.

For the curious the following two threads, although they are about XWA, likely refer to the same problem that causes graphical corruption on ATI video cards after the x1xx series.

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33937181&page=2

http://www.xwaupgrade.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9625

Apparently XWA used an older method to clear the z-buffer that has been broken in newer ATI hardware. (And nvidia hardware? I can't remember) The problem was fixed with a hacked exe for XWA that forced it to use a newer method, from what I gather.

In short, its a driver issue. Not a Vista issue. Although, with the same drivers JK renders properly for me using x1xx cards. I heard one report of some one using early drivers for a HD2xxx or HD3xxx series card that worked for Vista users. Since ATI doesn't give to craps about this game, its unlikely to ever be fixed. I have tried to solve this by tracking down Sige's OpenGL wrapper and I attempted to hack the exe myself but I don't really know what I'm doing and couldn't find the relevant entry.

I believe this is seperate but related to the "crappy colors" problem that modern nvidia hardware has in JK (same problem in many early Direct3d games) This isn't as noticeable in JK as it is in some other games from that era.

You should not need to use any compatibility modes in Vista for JK.

Sige did NOT make an OpenGL wrapper for JK. He made a JK JKL file VIEWER with OpenGL. (He gave me all of his JK-related stuff a couple years ago.)

One person's solution to JK graphics issue:
- NVidia 9800gtx, DX10, Vista (32-bit)
- Uninstalled nvidia's 190.38 driver and reinstalled older nvidia 186.18 driver and JK works just like it used to.

I am installing Windows 7 as we speak. Will I need compatibility mode with my NVidia card?

I doubt Nvidia really cares about this game either, I would guess its been luck that any of us are having success at all.

Some good info tho, I think we really need a thread with detailed specifics on what combinations of hardware and drivers do still work. I would like to point out that the Nvidia GTX260's (and higher I would guess) are working well even with the current driver.

It might have been Quib Mask, someone wrote one.

Well, I don't really know what to tell you Zeq. As I understand it I have the last item on the list of this site: http://www.naixela.com/alex/ I emailed asking for it and he was kind enough to dig up what he had.

The HUD does not work properly, but it more or less works. It doesn't solve the greater problems, unfortunately.

I would switch to an nvidia card, but their fixed aspect ratio scaling doesn't work with my monitor. I left them for that very reason. Plus, I am just plain tired of swapping cards all the time!

Frankly, all of the DX10 cards suck in one way or another in my experience.

Get a PCI card like a GeForce 6200. If your monitor has multiple inputs you can switch between them, otherwise get a video switch.

Ah, interesting. Either Sige did not give me that bit, or it is simply the viewer I mentioned.

Just to clarify, you can have two graphics cards (PCI and PCI-E) and when you stick the monitor's VGA plug into the PCI card and DVI plug to the PCI-E card, you can just switch between the monitor's analog and digital modes depending on the games you're playing (old ones with the 6200LE and new ones for whatever the PCI-E card is)?

Since that would sound pretty promising... and like it would create a million billion conflicting drivers and such. But at this point I might get a 6200 just to finish TODOA with this piece of junk machine...

If your monitor supports switching between multiple inputs, yes. I'm pretty sure JK can let you choose the rendering device with the advanced video switch, so you can choose the 6200. The only caveat is that with Vista/7, the new display driver model requires that each video card have the same kernel mode driver to keep aero enabled. Worst case, either disable aero or disable the 6200 in device manager when you aren't using it.

Conflicting drivers should not be an issue these days, even with ATI and nVidia on the same system. But success stories of that are mixed, so if you're worried just get an ATI 9000 series PCI card or similar.

Bah, it's only available for AGP or PCI-E around here. At least it was cheap.

And I guess after I get the new comp I can store it somewhere safe when, as it is very likely to happen, my future comp's GPU is going to fry.

I'm curious if you're suffering from the poor color dithering issue with this setup. I had a 8800GT for awhile and this problem was common to most games from the early direct3d era. Thief and its sequels are the most well known for the issue, its not readily apparent in JK since the use of shadows is pretty limited in this game. It looks like crap when you see it though.



I'm also curious if you have the color dithering issue with the GTX260. AFAIK, all DX10 capable cards suffer from it. I can provide some example comparisons from level 1 in JK for anyone curious. I'm sure Nvidia doesn't care either! They just haven't busted this particular title to the extent ATI has.

My experience:
x1900/x1800 with 8.12 and later drivers - Graphics are fine except either blaster bolts or sprites don't show up.
8800GT - dithering issues
HD4850 - horrible graphical corruption, completely unplayable. Its a HOM like effect. Probably would have dithering issues if you could actually see anything.



I'd be lying if I said I had a great understanding of it. It is basically just a replacement ddraw.dll though, and appears to be a openGL wrapper too me. It doesn't seem like what I think a jkl viewer is, but perhaps I'm thinking of the wrong thing there. At any rate, I have the files and source code stashed away...I don't see why Sige would mind if I gave them to anyone else and I'm certainly not going to be selfish with them if anyone wants them. I think he has moved on from JK to bigger and better things.



I tried this setup basically, but I was unable to find an option to select a video device in JK. Maybe I missed it? It would be awesome if that is available. It just seems to use the primary device for me, which means I have to reboot the machine and use different hardware profiles for different games. (I'm only using XP btw). I've had a few different combinations of video cards in my machine and I didn't have any noticable conflicts, even when using both nvidia and ATI hardware.

I'm at work, but I did take a SS the other day from BGJ. Not sure if you can tell anything from it:

http://binarydemons.com/JSHOT002.BMP

I didnt embed it because its 1920x1080.

And that's supposed to look weird how?

I dunno, I cant tell dithering from crappy 8bit textures and mipmap scaling at insanely close distances. I was hoping El Scorcho could explain.

The answer is "yes, it does have a dithering problem" in the sense that it's not actually doing any dithering.

Man, visual game technology's come a long way. By christ's left hairy nut is that UGLY.

Pretty much. Even an engine recreation is very limited in terms of what's possible using the original data files. Flags are used inconsistently and incorrectly, making it impossible to seamlessly replace skies or add water effects. One of the most striking visual improvements would be to generate emission maps using the full-bright values in colormaps, but the JK developers used the effect sparingly because the original hardware mode doesn't support it.

In a lot of ways Dark Forces is better:

The following are a couple comparison shots from when I had an 8800GT and an x850xt. The effect is fairly small in the pictures, as it is in JK in general. Again, this particular game just doesn't use shadows in such a way that its really obvious. I'd give you a better description, but the afternoon sun is glaring my PC monitor so badly that all I can actually see right now is the yellow sign. I remember there being more blotchy green in the 8800GT's shadows.

Hopefully these are the right images...again, I can't really see a thing at this time of day.





Oh yeah, its pretty obvious which one is the 8800GT now. The top one looks washed out.

Yeah, we figured that one out the hard way But the water sure did look pretty cool.

Feel free to do whatever you guys want with that ddraw.dll wrapper... it's probably pretty convoluted, though. It basically intercepts D3D/DDraw calls and renders them with OpenGL instead. There's lots of issues involving the old DDraw locking mechanism (hence the bad HUD) and the weird pre-transformed vertex format JK used.

Have you guys considered using a virtual machine? Like Emon suggested, but find something that won't translate the D3D calls (at least, not into more D3D calls). Or perhaps the D3D reference rasterizer... I don't know if that's a viable option, just throwing it out there

I don't know, because it was xXcLoNeXx's system. I'll try to remeber to ask him for screenshot(s) when I see him online again.


I have several source zips for ddraw wrappers and a few that are called some variation of jklviewer or jkogl, but none seem to match the descriptions you two gave. Would you guys link me to the wrapper source you are talking about? Even if I never get up enough motivation to do anything with it, I can at least be a (somewhat) reliable backup for it.


Follow the JK Command-line Param tutorial and use the -displayconfig command line param when opening JK.

I attached the source to this message. The binaries are too big to upload.

That does give me an option that looks like what I want, unfortunately it only gives the primary direct3d device and several software renderers as options. I have my x1800 installed and functional alongside it.

It works great for me!

Hurray for Zeq!

I'll probably be hosting SBX games this weekend. w00t

Sige, thanks for the source files. (Now, when Emon asks for it again, I will have it. -.- )



The options on that Advanced screen are what Windows/DirectPlay give to JK, so it isn't really JK's fault.


ORJ_JoS, I am glad JKLauncher works for you, considering all the weird bugs you have reported with older versions.

That's a great idea! The WARP rasterizer is available in Windows 7. Now to find out how the hell to use it...

Wouldn't it be possible to wrap the DX5 calls to a newer version that still has ddraw support like 7 or 8? I don't understand the underlying problems here, so I'm going at this in the dark.

You could, but DirectX is already doing that anyway.

That makes sense. Like I said, I don't know much about DirectX...

I think we should all just move on. >.>

No guns, no force. BATTLEGROUND JEDI.

First to 10 wins.

I kind of missed this initially. The instructions for the reference rasterizer indicate to change some things in the applications code to use it. I'm not really sure how feasible it is to do that to JK given our current sourcecodeless situation and all.