meltorizor: Dear fellow gangsters,

After fixing the game with the Github fix dlls for empty menus I can play the game, which is very nice as I played it a lot in my childhood. Still it seems that many text boxes and graphics don't work correctly. Many editable text boxes are backgrounded black with a dark brown font, making it very hard to read. Some text boxes, i.e. help and tutorial text boxes are completely black and lack any contrast to read which makes it impossible to comprehend.

Another graphical glitch is, and that's the main problem, that in the planning menu with the city overview, no colors except black are displayed. My gang borders, the chosen blocks for orders, everything related to planning and orders. From my childhood I remember that you see all the gang colors of the borders and blue/red background of blocks. When choosing the territory for orders, I only see black tiles.
All other colors not related to any text box or city planning are displayed correctly.

Technically I can play, but it's still not really satisfying. Especially in the later weeks, with all the chaos as it is, it will get even more confusing and hard to keep the track of my operations.

If anyone knows how to fix or workaround this, I'd be really grateful. It's all working, but the color scheme is missing. I strongly assume that is has something to do with the visuals fix.

Best regards

PS: I tried running it without the ddraw wrappers. It works... kinda. Gang and order colors are now displayed correctly but the menus are empty now, the mouse is creating tearing graphic glitches and the city map is lagging like crazy, breaking down to 2-3 FPS.
If anybody knows how to combine the best of these two - readable menus with no lag whatsoever together with the correct color schemes and readable text boxes - it would be very appreciated.

PPS: tried to use a modified ddraw.dll by inserting it into the system32 folder, but Windows won't let me do it, even when taking over all folder ownership and being the only admin. *sigh*

PPPS: I followed these steps:

1) Run regedit.exe
2) Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/AppCompatFlags/Layers
3) You should see an entry for Gangster.exe. Double click it to edit it.
4) Replace the entry currently in it with
"$ DWM8And16BitMitigation 8And16BitTimedPriSync 8And16BitAggregateBlts Layer_ForceDirectDrawEmulation"
(remove the quotes)

It fixed the stuttering and tearing issue but the menus are still empty. Still, this is the best option I have so far as all other color and text messages appear to be ok. Sadly, both fixes cannot be combined as it seems. I'll stick with this one as having the whole game displayed correctly except for empty menus is better than readable menus but wrong colors and blackened text boxes.

Still, if anybody has a fix, please tell me.

Best regards