Nevermind, got the file from Recluse so all's good! If and when I figure out a proper fix I'll post it.

Sorry I missed the post in the thread. Glad you PM'd! Good luck.

As there's 13 pages of comments here so far, I guess that there has been much testing and to'ing and fro'ing with this and that.

I've never been a fan of DI's sims, especially Hind, but would it help at all if I put some sort of webpage together with download links and stuff for the various files for Hind?

I could also host any files at (hopefully) some sort of permament address like my RapidShare account (for those near to or bigger than 5Mb).

Just a thought.

Yes! That would be most helpful FB. Recluse has saved several people wanting these, including not just the patches but also Lepus's old fix (for 3dfx?) and the common files thing.

Would be great if someone could figure out how's to run it on XP with the 3dfx version. Wait! Would be great if it would run in any form with latest Nvidia drivers and newer cards. I no longer can do even that with these specs. Also couldn't run the the 3dfx version on my Win98 voodoo5500 machine. :-(

Good idea, FB.

Well I manged to get Glide running (4GHz i7 quad, old-ish GTX285), Dual boot WinXP Pro 32-bit mode. Did the old setup like we did before in 2008. To Recap; Installed from Hind95 CD, copied over all the 3Dfx patch files (manually of course as the installer's no good in XP), copied missing Glass.CMP files from the other folder as mentioned previously, then copied over 3Dfx patch 1.2 (Voodoo 2) hind95.exe from The Patch Scrolls to ensure there wasn't any trouble w/ the old exe.

It might not be relevant but Nvidia driver version was 185.85 (32 bit version obviously) - couldn't go back any further of course due to the GTX285 card. I kept the desktop in its native res for my screen (1920x1080 32bit @120Hz). Default global Nvidia driver settings (although extra anti-aliasing settings might work, try it).

Same settings as per usual but with some extra "voodoo incantations" to prevent the hanging demon entering our blackscreen...

Settings in Zeck's wrapper:

- Global settings
- Texmem: 16MB
- Res: Try high res
- Refresh rate: by app
- V-Sync: Always off
- Mipmaps: By app (default)
- Gamma: 1.4 locked (optional, but I liked the look of the haze/dust in Afghanistan like this)
- Limit feature set: Most fancy shaders
- Render to: Own window (default)
- Thread policy: Crazy (if set to 'use render thread' it's still playable but this time we can see the previously invisible "End Mission Y/N" dialog)
- Resolution Limit: 1280x960

In Windows XP:

- In the Windows Shortcut, set compatibility mode to Win98 / Me.
- Optional but Recommended: Right-Click on the Taskbar, select Properties and then "Auto Hide the taskbar". Make sure that "Keep the taskbar on top" is enabled; if isn't, you might have a problem recovering from a CTD (I had to do a hard reset, so keep in hidden mode).

The game runs quite well, except for the Windows Taskbar slightly visible at the bottom of the screen in hidden mode. Looks alright to me, what do you think?





Next, Recovery from blackscreen after (CTRL+Q) End Mission "Y":

- Press ALT+ESC (to close the window).
- Click on hind95 on the taskbar (or ALT+TAB) to go back to the game. I found that if I just press ALT+TAB *without* moving the mouse at all, the game crashes. If the pointer isn't moving across the screen when it's maximised, it crashes. You might see a square sprite of the pointer. So, click on the taskbar to maximise the program and get that pointer moving instead of pressing ALT+TAB.
- As the game is still running (yet invisible) you can now safely drag the mouse down to the bottom right and click to continue.

To exit the game, exit as normal. When the screen dumps to desktop in 8-bit 640x480 mode, right-click on hind95.exe in the Task Manager (which you should already have running in the top left corner of your desktop ready to do this) and select End Process. That's it.

There's one last "black magic" step I found, necessary to prevent the blackscreen crash:

- When starting the game, first thing to do is to select Preferences and either turn off Speech altogether, or..
- Leave Speech and Music on (click on both buttons), but in the game you need to listen to the entire mission briefing. If you click 'Commit' too soon before he's finished talking, it CTD's after mission. When Komradski's "speech" (briefing) ends, I hear a small distorted 'click' as the music returns. I'm guessing there's an old DirectSHOW sound conflict somewhere? I found that if this click doesn't occur, you are rewarded w/ a crash after the mission. Anyway that's what I did to stop it and I'm progressing through my Afghanistan Campaign in 3Dfx Mode nicely.

BTW, I didn't get any sound during the intro Animations, so I'm guessing it's probably a codec thing... Maybe those movies can be re-encoded into a playable format? Which might have a happy consequence of stopping the game from crashing?? Not sure, if someone wants to try, that'd be awesome. It might be fixable if you have some old Directshow codecs? I had to do something similar to fix an old game's sound, I-War2, Tron or System Shock I think, too long ago! Anyway at least we're getting there and 3Dfx is playable again finally (without a real Voodoo 2 card)! Good flying & spasibo komradskis.

And don't forget to think in Russian, Mr Gant.

Nice Work there Ziggy, and it looks fantastic! Just a quick question - What format are those Movie files encoded in? I don't have Hind to hand so i can't poke around with it at the moment.

PS Maybe renaming the files so they won't run, or even delete them would prevent the crashes??

Cheers

HWKI

I'm glad a couple of you thought my idea was a good one. If someone could perhaps PM me with download links or e-mail me with files attached, that would be great. I'm a little off-balance right now and am finding it hard to find the time and to concentrate, as I'm doing some extra work outside due to nice weather and am having some domestic issues. Otherwise you know that I'd be all over it, myself.

Or of course if you don't want to have to wait for me to make a webpage and do updates, etc. you could always do a guide and have it made a sticky topic here in the forums. Then you, yourselves, could update it as-and-when needed and have full control.

Thanks for the kind words sir, you're welcome. Yes, that's an excellent idea but the Animation cutscenes can already be disabled in game Preferences, no need to rename/delete. Good idea though. For me, the game CTD'd whether they were enabled or not. As for the ".Q3" format, I looked at a couple in a Hex editor and couldn't see anything identifiable aside from "ANIM" at the beginning. An old DOS format maybe? Don't know.

BTW, in my Hind95 tests in XP 32-bit I had an idea to copy the files over to my Win7x64 dual-boot environment just to see what happened (after manually creating the registry keys inside Wow6432node) - I can report that it *didn't* run "pre-installed" in a 64-bit enviro. Cheers!

Well, sadly, no luck on my end. Tried every angle I could think of. Might give another try on my old Win98 Voodoo5500 machine although that failed at least for 3Dfx last time I tried.