I’m playing Ascendancy on a WinXP box that is pretty much modern, but if you know the game, then you know Ascendancy is far from modern! It came out in 1995, when running higher-end games required a “protected” memory mode so that games could be run in 32-bit emulation. Well now I’m all grown up and my computer runs things in 32-bit mode natively.
No problem, right? Well… okay, two problems.
One, my mouse (a USB mouse) takes about 5x as much motion as it normally does to move the cursor – probably because my mouse is accelerated in software. Two, because my gamma is corrected in software (my monitor just doesn’t put out the brightness it did back in 1997), this game does an end-run around that software, and everything is dimmer than the inside of a dog.
So, is there any way I can convince the game that it doesn’t need to be “protected”? Is there perhaps a way I can replace DOS4GW.EXE with some kind of dummy file so that it thinks it’s protected, but it’s really running natively?
Gorsnak - two minor flaws with that (otherwise excellent) idea.
No floppy drive…
Without gamma correction software running, I still have the dimming problem.
However, your advice made me think of running it from the command line under WinXP, and I am happy to report that… there’s no difference. Harumph. Thanks for the spark, though.
Well, in response to the first, it should be possible to use a bootable CD for the same effect, no? I’ve never played around with making bootable CDs. As for gamma correction, I’ve no idea (besides only playing late at night when it’s pitch black).