kblood: I am hoping to see Syndicate Wars released here soon. I think it will have much the same problem. I already have it working in DosBox, but so far, GoG have managed to make the good old games, run better than I ever made them run myself. Or in some cases they at least saved me lots and lots of time tweaking DosBox settings.
Try this file:
http://keeperklan.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=86 It gives unlimited Zoom. I did see it crash after playing for a few hours, but when playing in other resolutions than 800x600 it seems to crash within 30 min often. But the unlimited zoom really helps I think, since it had a tendency to be unable to zoom out as much as you would like it to.
But the reason why I can forgive GoG for this, is because I know this time was around the time were 3D Fx was introduced, before ATI ever had much say on the game graphics market, and it was while OpenGL was still dominant. There was a war between these manufactures and software developers had no idea who to put their money on.
3DFx seemed to be the winning part, but Direct3D had just been introduced, and was still very new. OpenGL did not even see it as real competition yet if I remember correctly.
And all this makes it very hard to make it fully compatible with all of todays hardware, since it was from the time where you usually had to buy games especially for the graphics card you owned, or you should not expect to see any 3d hardware rendering.
I have tried making DK2 use 3DFx so it might make use of nGlide. But that does not seem possible either. Would be nice to know if there were other engine settings than 2 or 4, and what those settings are supposed to be.
I think maybe I should try running the game in my Windows XP emulator.
DK2 is a D3D app only, no Glide support. That means that without the sources they can't do much. And that's the thing that annoys Me :). That nothing has been done. If only they could recompile the game against DX9, everything would be fine. Without this it will probably never work stable. As for the VM I gave it a try (vmware player) and the game crashes after about 30 to 50 minutes of play which is better than a crash on the start :)