squid830: How exactly would that help? That has nothing to do with the graphics.
Zacron: Actually it does. Issues similar to what you are describing are very common when running older games in anything newer than XP (Vista, 7, 8). Starcraft had a similar problem, and this was a fix.
At the very least, try it. The worst thing that can happen is it does not work and you reopen the process and move on.
Yep tried it, didn't make any difference (as expected) - but I am running IN XP (not newer than - not that I specified it), so that could be why. It makes some sense for those newer OS's since they're 64-bit (when running older 16/32-bit games).
Although I have to say I did some other stuff that I didn't think would work. Basically enabled optimisations for Trilinear filtering and anisotropy from my NVidia control panel (not sure why I had them disabled anyway). Then in ddraw.ini I set GPUBlt=1, Mode=0, then in f2_res.ini I set DX9 mode with 32 bit colour (the latter can be done via the settings menu, but the former not).
Anyway, when setting scaling or not it worked - BUT it was slow as all hell. I mean REALLY slow - even the mouse cursor would lag!
BUT I was able to fix that by... ensuring I had Vertical Sync switched OFF in the NVidia control panel. I normally have this set to "Adaptive", so it should have switched off unless frame rate was too low, but I guess it interfered with this game for some reason. I wouldn't have thought that Vertical Sync would affect what's essentially a 2D game so much! It's now smooth as anything.
The thing is, after all that, I decided to run the game in 1024x768 without scaling, since my monitor only goes to 1680x1050 and it looks like crap in that resolution when scaled. But at least I got it to run in DX9 without slow-down, as before I needed DD7 mode. So it does look a bit better...