Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: djcouchycouch - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Hello there!

Before someone pointed out to me the Sega PC Reloaded project, I had started a similar project of my own. I loved Sega Rally and Virtua Fighter 2 for PC and still have the disks. When I got the urge to play them recently I was sad that they didn't play higher than 640x480, even with the kinda/sorta/unreleased/released direct3d patches. So I thought I'd take a look to see if I could do anything about that.

I found the dxwrapper project, by Jari Komppa. It's a wrapper DLL that intercepts DirectDraw and Direct3D calls. I managed to get to compile and work and then started looking to see if I could adapt it to the above games.

Long story short, I managed to get something working.

VF2 and Sega Rally running at 1920. Click to embiggen.





I've spent a week so far on it and I'm pretty happy with the results.

You can find the patch here https://dl.dropboxus...rapper.1.00.zip

You can find more details at the "sega_dxwrapper for Sega PC games" thread at Sega-16 http://www.sega-16.c...r-Sega-PC-games

For my next steps, they include:
- introduce a mode that maintains the same aspect ratio as 640x480. Right now the graphics are always stretched.
- investigate some texture issues (holes in VF2 backgrounds and Sega Rally UI) that have been there since the original d3d patches.
- investigate supporting Daytona USA Deluxe


Misc notes:

I managed to get VF2 and Sega Rally working at the same time because they use DirectDraw and D3D in the same basic way. Daytona, from the quick pass I did, uses more recent D3D APIs.

It's too early for me to say that sega_dxwrapper will be a general solution to old Sega PC games or if there will have to be individual versions for each game. Would be nice if it were just one, though.

But for game support, I'll probably have to take a look at them one at a time. Realistically, I can probably look at one or two more but after I won't have enough time. That's why the source is also there if anyone wants to continue it.

There are some things I'd like to do that right now I can't:
- increase the draw distance in Sega Rally but I'm not very familiar with exe hacking. I don't know how to navigate raw assembly and hex codes so whenever I try looking at an exe in IDA I don't get very far with it.
- replace the 3d models in Sega Rally but the file format for their models has got me stumped. They're relocatable executable files loaded into memory.

There are things I don't think I can ever fix:
- the software rendering. right now, both games sort, transform and clip all the polygons in software, sending the pre-transformed vertex buffers to DrawPrimitive. That means I can't figure out where objects are in 3d space and where the camera is. It's probably also the reason why a z-buffer doesn't help with the polygon popping. And because I don't know where everything is, I can't insert new objects, like say background objects in VF2 from the arcade version.
- the polygon seams. They're really visible on everything.

I think that's it for now!

Thanks!
djcc