WINDOWS 8 AND RM2K3

Windows 8 and RM2K3
...and You!
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First off, hello all, I'm Ramza, and I'm not nearly active enough in this community to be instantly recognizable to everyone. I was the webmaster of a rather large, and quite active rm2k3 website back in the day, and I'm a bit of an oldschool rpg maker 2k/2k3 "programmer" of sorts.

I have recently purchased a brand new laptop, whose system specs are nothing to balk at, which is running Windows 8. After many months of tweaking my OS so that it is bearable, I have discovered a few issues with it that translate into poor rm2k(3) performance.

For reference, I am not sure if the true cause of these issues is actually windows 8, as I only have the one laptop running it, it could also be my particular video card setup.

Now, to the good stuff:
I have noticed a couple of video related issues with rm2k(3) while running on windows 8

• Fullscreen does not work

Running the RPG_RT.exe in compatibility mode allows the game to play, but that leads me to the second problem:

• The frame rate in fullscreen mode is horrible, even when nothing is happening on screen in a brand new project with no common events running.

I ran a screen capture program to verify, the game would run at a consistent 15-17fps in fullscreen, while running fine at 60fps windowed (as an aside, I'm sure rm2k3 runs at 30fps normally). I'm sure that most people probably run their rm games in windowed mode anyway, so this isn't such a big deal to most of you. But for some of us, this is a pretty solid problem. I want to be immersed in the rm games I play - it brings me back to a simpler time - of early console games, where the entire TV was filled with the game. It's all part of the experience for me.

So what can we do about it? Well that's what I'm here for.

When I first discovered the no fullscreen problem, I scoured the forums looking for resolutions, I discovered Cherry's another fullscreen Mod. This shell application hides the original window, and draws a duplicate of the window using OpenGL, which can support fullscreen. This worked for making the game play at fullscreen, but my monitor is widescreen, and has no way to make the aspect ratio stay fixed (or at least no way that I could find). Despite this, if you're not using a widescreen monitor, this program should pretty much fix this issue for you, and the additional filters can make the game look a lot better than it normally would. The main downside to this workaround, is the need to run the separate Game Starter exe for it to function.

I managed to find an alternate method of essentially doing the same thing as Cherry's Mod, however. DXGL. A directdraw wrapper that translates DD calls into OpenGL calls. Obviously, for this to work, your graphics card needs to support OpenGL. After downloading and installing the program, a settings window is used to specify what program you want to intercept directdraw calls from. As this is not an rm specific program, you do need to specify the location of your RPG_RT.exe file. This program supports maintained aspect ratio scaling, however, it doesn't support minimizing, or windowed mode (attempts to minimize the window result in it still being up on top of everything, setting it to windowed mode causes it to crash entirely).

This program causes the specified application to run scaled in a window that is the same size as your desktop resolution, bypassing any issues your OS or GPU have with running something below 800x600 resolution. It has a number of filters that can be applied to make the application appear more fancy, although I just prefer the setting which simply upscales the graphics without a filter.

An issue that I found with it, however, is that if you've previously set windows compatibility settings on the rpg_rt.exe file, these settings are incompatible with the DXGL wrapper. If you run the setup exe as administrator on your computer, it will warn you if this is the case, and automatically remove any such compatibility settings from the registry for you. Alternatively, you can manually remove them, but I didn't have much luck attempting that.

While I was messing with settings on the DXGL, I did manage to have the overlay program detect that rm2k3 was running at 60fps, I am sure that was incorrect, however. After nailing down the exact settings I was looking for, I was able to get rm2k3 to run at a solid 30fps according to the overlay program, which was a lot nicer looking and less jumpy than the 15-17fps I was getting with the windows compatibility mode method.

A slight issue I've noticed is that screenshots taken while running this way are at my full desktop resolution, and need to be cropped and resized back to 640x480, but that's not a big deal.

The windowed mode/alt-tabbing problem is pretty serious, but the programmer of DXGL is still working on many compatibility problems with newer versions hopefully ironing out this bug. On the other hand, not being able to tab out, or go into windowed mode isn't that big an issue to me, as I said above, it's all about immersion.

As I said above, I am not entirely sure if this problem happens on all windows 8 computers, or only the ones with the type of GPU I have (a dual switching intel HD/nvidia geforce GTX 675MX). I have seen it said that having videocards in a crossfire, or SLI configuration can cause the fullscreen crash problem as well, and that using only one video card can resolve it without any of this DirectDraw trickery - I'm not sure.

Either way, it's better to have this information available somewhere if someone should need it, than sit on it myself and never tell anyone.

Cheers,


-Ramza