Yup, knew there was something that was disabling 3D Hardware mode. Going to have to try this when I get home.

I can verify that when that change is made (which is actually a 1 bit change), I get 3d acceleration. Still in wrong aspect ratio, so that doesn't stop me from continuing on this hack.. (and I have a couple additional ideas that would be fun if I pull this through).

Another thing that happened is that WITH that change, my wrapper's d3d device creation now fails. My guess? The gog version reverses the "is this 3d device ok" check, and my fake device doesn't have some capability bit on that the gog version wants.

Anyway, that would explain a bunch of strange behavior that I'd seen, so it's better to continue with that "3d acceleration enable patch"..

Hm. Rather annoying. I hit the same bug as I've hit earlier, now with the "3d enable" patch. I hit the same bug even with a pure passthrough wrapper, which usually means that something isn't being wrapped, leading the application to feed a wrapped pointer to something that assumes a non-wrapped one and things go boom.

What's weird is that this happens after the ingame manages to get one frame on screen, and then performs a color clear blit on the back buffer with "wait" flag on (the only time I've seen the game use said flag).

Whilst browsing the log I've also found that while switching to the ingame the game calls unlock on a non-locked surface once (and probably ignores the error code returned) and asks for back buffer from the back buffer (and never uses the pointer it gets)..

I have posted a solution for ATI cards in Cyphox's topic

I have no idea how useful this will be to you, but very recently someone made a DX11 wrapper for X-Wing Alliance, and the source code is here: https://github.com/JeremyAnsel/xwa_ddraw_d3d11

Maybe there's something useful there that could solve your problems? XWA's hardware renderer is of course much newer and more advanced than TIE95/XvT's, but there are bound to be some similarities.

Aspect Ratio probably can be fixed via your video card driver. I don't have the same issue.

That being said, it sounds like a wrapper is still needed for Windows 8.

BTW, the whole "music fix" exe is just the EXE from the Tie Fighter Reconstructed mod that I put out. I guess people are using the old Windows CD version exe (which still has 3D enabled in it). And yeah there's a bunch of other changes to that EXE as part of the music fixes. I think people got confused and thought that they had to install the original mod as well as the gog version of the mod. I've fixed the instructions to be way more clear now.

Looking at the source code, it appears to use the same version of directx as tie95, so I'm not all that sure about "more advanced".. unless there's something strange, it should be possible to make that wrapper work with tie95 with small(ish) changes. It doesn't work as is though, I just get a crash at start.

My guess is most of the differences might be the concourse rather than the in-flight engine.

Anyway, nice to hear that it's the same DX level. I just assumed it was higher because XWA has a lot of effects (gas leaks, sparks, shield impact glows) that XvT doesn't have at all.

EDIT: From the original author: XWA's concourses aren't paletted so there was no need for it there. But that should be easy to implement from your previous wrappers, yes?

You should get in contact with him, he says he doesn't have the time to adapt it himself but he'd be willing to help out.

Here's the forum thread where he is

Sometimes it's easier to push old engine forward (with new hardware) than to start over. Crimson Skies, for instance, is advertised as being directx7 game (and won't launch without dx7) but it only uses dx7 interfaces to check that dx7 is available, and then falls down to dx5 (if I remember correctly).

Yes, that's another game I still haven't gotten dx wrapper finished as of yet.. =)
I can contact him through github if I need. I've grabbed the source and I'm trying to compile it at the moment, hoping it will work better somehow than mine does.. Unfortunately he's using a later version of visual studio than I am, and he's using some language constructs not available in my version, so this will take a while :(

This is cool stuff. I hope this eventually leads to 3D acceleration patches for all 4 games to work on modern machines for Windows 7/8 and on both AMD/nVidia cards. Maybe even GOG integrating it into their releases if the proper permission can be granted.

After a bunch of changes I got his wrapper to compile, but to support tie95 it would need a lot of changes. Apparently xwa is truecolor all through.. and his wrapper does not support blt operations (which tie95 uses a lot)..

So yeah, xwa is probably a more mature engine, even if it still uses the same version(s) of DirectX as tie95.

I'm not quite sure where to go from here. If I get my wrapper over that crash I'm seeing currently, his wrapper answers a lot of technical questions about the actual 3d operations.
GOG has asked, and received, permission to use my wrappers.

That's awesome. I am following this with even higher interest now.

Very cool, I hope you get proper credit. :) They're looking for subcontractors to help with stuff like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/gameDevClassifieds/comments/2j9f67/gogcom_is_looking_for_skilled_programmers_and/ (ad I posted several weeks ago)

..and different interests and skill sets..