siwu’s blog

GTA2 Classics Stuck at 640×480 (and fix!)

Lately with friends we’ve been having some multiplayer fun at GTA 2 Classics Edition (the free one that you can download at Rockstar Classics). I’m amazed to see how cool this game still is in multiplayer. BUT, there was a but. As of now it was impossible to make it run at more than 640×480, despite setting higher resolutions on the GTA 2 Manager. While it’s not a big issue, it’s still annoying nonetheless.
So I’ve looked and looked and looked and looked on the net to find some kind of answer. While I did find some people who had the same problem as me (and all my friends for that matter), I did not find any answer.
Because I’m not desperate, I’ve took my tools and started decompiling GTA 2 (;))
Long story short, here is a patch to activate high resolution on GTA 2 Classics Edition (aka 9.6F) only:

gta2patch.exe (7 kb)

Please bear in mind that this patch is VERY ghetto. It doesn’t even check if you are patching the right version, so USE AT YOU OWN RISK!
For the details, the source code and the alternate methods (if you don’t feel like downloading and launching an executable from an unknown source), hit the jump.
Continue reading GTA2 Classics Stuck at 640×480 (and fix!)…

DWMaxx: Back to business

It’s been a solid 3 months since I’ve last worked on DWMaxx. I am just posting this quick post to tell everyone that I’m resuming work on it. I’ve had a LOT of computer problems (my 2 computers died), and a lot of real life stuff to take care of.
Moreover, after my computer died and I pretty changed everything in it (cpu, mobo, ram), my second computer died too. Which left me unable to work on DWMaxx at all (2 computers needed, as one is for debug).
So what’s to be expected?
Continue reading DWMaxx: Back to business…

Computer Outage - Not?

There may be a stall in the development of DWMaxx for the next two weeks, because I think my motherboard is dying (Asus P4P800 Deluxe). I spent the whole weekend trying to revive it, it works sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t…. Well, after 3 days and nights and 100€ on a new hard drive, it seems I’ll have to let it go… After all, it’s been on 24h/24 for the last 5 years… And because everything has evolved, I can’t just buy a new mobo, I’ll need a complete upgrade (from the CPU to the GPU). And I’ll do it when I have the money, that is probably at the end of the month!
In the mean time, I’m still trying to make it work again, because I’m not as coffy on the laptop
UPDATE 12/02/2008: It’s alive! True magic involved here. Read on for the whole story.
Continue reading Computer Outage - Not?…

DWMaxx going Open Source

I’ve decided that for the good of this project, I may be best for it to go open source. So that’s it, DWMaxx is open sourced! It is distributed under GPLv2 (to prevent people from using it for commercial purposes). Of course, it doesn’t mean that I’m letting this project down, not at all! But I don’t want it to finish like SPrintWindow (I still have to commit the sources somewhere…).
I’ll try to comment the code as often as I can, and write documentations too.

Anyway, you can now find everything on the DWMaxx Google Code project page.

On a side note, I’ve been working pretty hard to get 3D window rotations working. I think I’m on something, but it might be trickier than I thought (because theses things are quite hard-wired inside the DWM). I’ll keep you guys posted.

DWMaxx: Z Rotation

So yesterday I spent most the evening and night rewriting some of the low level code, to interact more directly with MIL (on which DWM sits). The result is a much faster code, and thus creates smoother animations. This also allowed me to implemented Z Rotation

Once again, pardon my AGP card for the slow capture framerate

Sinapse running DWMaxx

Quick video of one of the first shots of Sinapse running in pair with DWMaxx, hope you’ll like it

DWMaxx: Another Quick Tech Demo

So tonight I tried to make Sinapse run with DWMaxx. The two mains issues were that Sinapse is old, and that I was running into some kind of lags.
Basically, when I would resize the window in the animation loop, the window would not resize. After tweaking everything in my code, something came to light.

DWM uses timing magic to minimize the number of scene rendering is has to do! When idle, for instance, my desktop runs at 2 fps (according to Fraps). And indeed, when I change the size of the my window, the scene doesn’t get redrawn. But thankfully, the DWM has also the less known DWM Frame Timing API. Basically, this API allows you to control the rendering frame-rate of the screen, according mostly to “refreshes” (V-Sync) signals. So, indeed, I requested my frame to get redrawn after I change a window size.

Also, I’ve added the possibility to change the window’s position (regardless of it’s real position, it’s only graphic).

And here’s what it looks like, running inside Sinapse (which is being rewritten):

DWMaxx: Unleashing your DWM ;)

Hey folks, tonight (actually before going to bed), I want to introduce you to a tech preview of my new library: DWMaxx. It is using my weeks of research into the DWM, and at the moment I’m quite happy with the first results
By the way, I want to thank you all for your kind words about this project, thank you folks. I’m sorry I’m not replying all the emails, but at the moment I’m really hooked into real-life stuff. But fear not, I will reply!
Also, A BIG THANK YOU TO AVE, without him, much of the current design would not the way it is!

Everything you see is running on a P4E 3.0 GHz with a GeForce 7600 GS (it’s an AGP card, hence the 15-20 FPS only).

So, here we go, first demo: True Zooming

Hacking into Vista’s Desktop Window Manager (DWM)

Window texture is soooo last week, when you can manipulate the windows themselves

Jump for the (quite long I admit) story
Continue reading Hacking into Vista’s Desktop Window Manager (DWM)…

DWM Hacking, Extracting the Window Texture

Lately I’ve been working with Ave on this, and here are the first results: