So, a big part of the nostalgia of this game is, for me, a silly thing- the changes to possession view on some monsters, like Salamanders seeing the world in red, Skeletons in blue-grey, etc. It was this big deal when I was a kid trying out his first 3D-accelerated card. While the game is running wonderfully stable now, the effects like that seem to be absent. Are they working for anyone, or is this just something lost to time and memory as far as functionality goes?

This is with the new update applied and using a Radeon 6950 on Windows 7 64-bit.

Hmmm, I dont recall those effects when I played DkII a few years back on using a VM, and I have no clue if they were present when I played it at release. I do remember some of those effects for Dk 1 so perhaps they are only in the first one (although no salamanders in it).

Same here. No color differences and the textures look a bit blocky. I think it has to do with the fact that the shortcut points to 'DKII-dx.exe' which only seems to allow for software rendering. I ran the 'DKII.exe' executable and sure enough no more blocky textures and the color fiters are back when possessing. I do noticed some lag within the main menu when using hardware rendering. Also, the saved games did not show up between the different versions.

How stable is the DKII.exe compared with DKII-d.exe?

Overlays work still, (e.g. the fly) it's just colour adjustments that have gone missing. They didn't work in hardware or software for me, so I didn't even realise there were supposed to be any... Had to look it up on youtube to see what they were supposed to look like. :/

ok, I can see where the problem comes from. I don't like either of the quick fixes though, because one will screw up your desktop colours if the game crashes or you quit while possessing a creature, and the other will break alt-tab. I'll see if I can think up something better...

Hi timeslip, first a big "thanks" for your patching work on many classical games! :)
(beside, I'm looking forward to your reverse engineering posts on your blog)

If you are currently working on a updated DKII patch/fix, what is your policy on integrating other fixes developed by the community?

The well known bug of missing Black Knights or Dark Angels (introduced in 1.51, still in 1.7) bug can be fixed by v1.3 maps (standalone fix here or as part of the unofficial 1.73 patch).

Over at KeeperKlan forum some people try to fix some more of the known bugs, like the "annoyment in hand inversion" bug or wrong speechs and missing strings. See here , maybe some of the changes can be integrated/backported...

A intresting "fix" to integrate would be the "extended maximum zoom out level" patch done by a guy here, as this would combine well with the now available higher resolutions ;) (like in supreme commander).

Some believe, updated sound DLLs could help DKII, too (also here).

overall, thanks for your DKII graphics patch :)

In general, GOG can't integrate third party patches. See other posts on the subject by people with bluer text than mine.

Well, was this GOG policy not loosen a little bit (or even lifted) with the integration and promotion of your "hardware acceleration fix"? :)

I mean, looks like you have the authority (from EA to GOG to you) to make a "third party" DKII fix (semi-)official, well, then you could give blessing to some more existing community fixes (review, integrate or backport them) and package the long required and final 1.9 patch for DKII. :)

weird, they work for me. maybe its just Win 7 because i use Win XP.

I'm having this problem on four separate computers, three of them on Win 7 and one of them on Win XP. Everything else works great, but I'd sure like to see a fix for this as possession is one of my favourite parts of the game.

what card are you using?