Posted November 20, 2022
I've only recently installed this game eventhough I bought it at the release, mainly due to the fact I had retail (vanilla) version working just fine only without the video clips (black screen, sound was fine).
So I decided to finally check the GOG version - it's nice that they downgraded it to latest official 1.2 release. First bump - joystick doesn't work. Quick search through the forums - found the solution posted by sigkill9 - to delete dinput.dll
But I noticed another problem - the 2d cockpit art is missing, only 3d virtual cockpit with blurry textures is present. Looked for any mention of it on the forum but seems no one complained.
The game default setup is 1024x768 resolution with Direct3D API, the problem is at this resolution the original 2d cockpit art will not be displayed. Originally the game run only in 640x480, the option to increase resolution was introduced with subsequent patches IIRC. The cockpit art would most likely scale poorly to 800x600 and 1024x768, and higher res art was never drawn, so they most likely decided to drop it completely for those higher res graphics. But thanks to upscaling options of nGlide there is a way to do it better!
So to enable this fine 2d cockpit art do the following:
• edit the eaw.ini file, set the resolution to 640x480 (don't worry, in the end it will be higher)
[GRAPHICS]
Width=640
Height=480
• run nglide_config and make sure the Screen resolution is set to 1280x960 (it's exaclty 2 x 640x480)
• In the game graphics options set the 3d renderer to Glide
The end result is that the game internally will run at 640x480 which enables the 2d cockpit art to display, but the 3dfx wrapper (nGlide) will upscale the 3d resolution 2x - which will effectively be 1280x960 which is better than that set by default. Thanks to the res being exactly 2x the original, the 2d art will not be distorted in any way - 1 pixel at 640x480 will be replaced by 4 pixels at 1280x960.
So I decided to finally check the GOG version - it's nice that they downgraded it to latest official 1.2 release. First bump - joystick doesn't work. Quick search through the forums - found the solution posted by sigkill9 - to delete dinput.dll
But I noticed another problem - the 2d cockpit art is missing, only 3d virtual cockpit with blurry textures is present. Looked for any mention of it on the forum but seems no one complained.
The game default setup is 1024x768 resolution with Direct3D API, the problem is at this resolution the original 2d cockpit art will not be displayed. Originally the game run only in 640x480, the option to increase resolution was introduced with subsequent patches IIRC. The cockpit art would most likely scale poorly to 800x600 and 1024x768, and higher res art was never drawn, so they most likely decided to drop it completely for those higher res graphics. But thanks to upscaling options of nGlide there is a way to do it better!
So to enable this fine 2d cockpit art do the following:
• edit the eaw.ini file, set the resolution to 640x480 (don't worry, in the end it will be higher)
[GRAPHICS]
Width=640
Height=480
• run nglide_config and make sure the Screen resolution is set to 1280x960 (it's exaclty 2 x 640x480)
• In the game graphics options set the 3d renderer to Glide
The end result is that the game internally will run at 640x480 which enables the 2d cockpit art to display, but the 3dfx wrapper (nGlide) will upscale the 3d resolution 2x - which will effectively be 1280x960 which is better than that set by default. Thanks to the res being exactly 2x the original, the 2d art will not be distorted in any way - 1 pixel at 640x480 will be replaced by 4 pixels at 1280x960.
