It seems that you're using an outdated browser. Some things may not work as they should (or don't work at all).
We suggest you upgrade newer and better browser like: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera

×
Community
SoulbringerNew patch for better compatibility with modern systems(17 posts)(17 posts)
(17 posts)
Pages:
1
2
This is my favourite topic
Posted January 27, 2017
high rated
First of all, this thing won't let me post links for some reason, so replace [] with . where needed.

This patch was initially developed to allow the game to run through dgVoodoo DirectX Wrapper. Since then, it has been updated so it runs better through native DirectX APIs as well.

It's based on retail version of the game, but should work fine with GOG version as well after adding some missing files. I noticed GOG version has some issues, like inability to change gamma with F2 and F3 keys, crashing on certain configurations, doesn't work on AMD cards without starting the game on single core, EAX enabled executable doesn't work and there appears to be glitches in-game, eg. in the first cutscene, ferryman goes around the house, then walks through solid door to enter the house, doesn't happen with original.

It can be downloaded from http[]//community[]pcgamingwiki[]com/files/file/844-soulbringer-better-directx-compatibility-patch/

Just follow the instructions carefully, game executable files shouldn't require any other compatibility settings other than those mentioned, and even then not all of them are needed if you run the game via dgVoodoo.

dgVoodoo basically makes the game run via DirectX 11, but DirectX 10.1 compliant graphics card is sufficient. It can be downloaded from http[]//dege[]freeweb[]hu/dgVoodoo2.html and the discussion forum is at http[]//www[]vogons[]org/viewforum.php?f=59 You set it up by extracting DDraw.dll and D3DImm.dll from MS folder to your Soulbringer installation folder. Then you can use the included setup utility program to change some settings, you can set scaling mode to Stretched, keep Aspect Ratio and disable the watermark on the DirectX tab (watermark is there by default so you know the wrapper works).

Current version of dgVoodoo has some issues with intro cinematics, these will be resolved in the next version, whenever it comes out. There is also the possibility of future version fixing the issues with blurry text in DX6 and DX7 modes, at least that's the plan.

One more thing, you should also download https[]//drive[]google[]com/open?id=0B2DPRdP0LBDGMC0yeng5Qkc1Mk0 It includes a missing cinematic, newer version of one of game script files, which is probably a small bug fix of some sort and some English language files. Can't really tell what's the practical difference between those and the ones bundled with GOG version, other languages have identical files between versions.

I hope this helps someone. I got the game running flawlessly on 3 different machines at home, all running Windows 10 and having graphics cards from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
Post edited February 05, 2017 by UCyborg
Posted January 28, 2017
avatar
UCyborg: this thing won't let me post links for some reason
You need a certain amount of Rep points to be able to post links.

As for the patch, it sounds cool! I just bought the game but I haven't played it yet. I'll keep this patch in mind when the time comes.

EDIT:

Here's your link:
http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/844-soulbringer-better-directx-compatibility-patch/
Post edited January 28, 2017 by UniversalWolf
Posted February 05, 2017
I thought so about the links. I typically only post when I got something to contribute and this happened to be the first time on these particular forums. But people that found out about my patches at other places know that I don't post crap. :D Sad such anti-spam measures have to be implemented because of certain bad folks.

I said in the Readme that DX6 renderer is faster than DX7, this is actually dependent on graphics drivers. At least on my machine when the game is run without dgVoodoo, DX6 is faster, but with the latest WIP version of dgVoodoo, DX7 is faster. And it was probably like that on the hardware of the time when the game was released. It doesn't matter as much in practice though since you must play the game at 60 FPS to avoid glitches at higher frame-rates and selecting DX6 requires least user intervention since it's programmed to set refresh rate to 60 Hz and activate VSYNC. Software and DX7 renderers don't do that.

One major difference between my version and GOG is that mine doesn't do any resolution scaling, so by default, the game will change actual monitor resolution to the one you select in its launcher application. dgVoodoo has a pretty good solution to that problem, just have to set Scaling mode setting to Stretched, keep Aspect Ratio in its configuration program. This way, you can pick 4:3 resolution for things to look right since game stretches at higher aspect ratios and your monitor stays at its native resolution. Oh and the latest WIP version of dgVoodoo is fully compatible with this game, bugs that were present in 2.53 are gone.

Another difference is GOG version runs in borderless fullscreen mode, the original game runs in real fullscreen. With the old DirectX, gamma cannot be changed when running in a window. dgVoodoo has ability to make the game run in regular windowed mode if desired, plus gamma can be changed as well.

One thing that would be awesome to fix is the blurry text problem with DX6 and DX7 renderers. It happens because the game uses non-standard texture coordinates for text rendering, which was required in the old times to make the text look right with graphics drivers that weren't strictly standard compliant. If you want to know more, search for terms "texel alignment" and "alternate pixel centers".

It can be done, the author behind Need for Speed III Modern Patch has done it, it's just a bit tricky without the game's source code.
Post edited February 05, 2017 by UCyborg
Posted February 18, 2017
This totally works! thank you!
Posted February 20, 2017
Hello UCyborg,

You are the man!

Having had a ton of trouble to get this incredible game to run on my AMD HD 6850, but finally decided to try your patch and it runs like a charm.

On Win7 64 bit, I first dropped an atiumdag.dll into the game folder. That needs to be from the AMD Catalyst driver 12.8 or older, as AMD dropped driver support for older games at that point. Having checked the atiumdag.dll at dll-files, which was nearly double the size it should be, I downloaded the Catalyst 12.8 from softpedia.com and extracted the DLL from there. If you install it, check your Windows/SysWOW64 folder and copy it into the Soulbringer folder.

Then I copied the files from your patch, applied the registry fix and set the three executables to Win98/ME compatibility.

You can reinstall your newest AMD driver for your card after this. After you launch Soulbringer, you can select the HD 6800 series DX6 renderer and a resolution of 1280x960x32. Disable EAX if you do not have it. Running the game with this renderer allows you to apply the settings from your newest AMD driver. First make sure, to enable GPU scaling, then set its mode to centered (you might need to set it to a different mode and then reset it, to get it recognized). This will make the game run with a black frame and not stretch the video. The benefit of which is that the picture is much more clear.

I recommend to set anti-aliasing to USE APPLICATION SETTINGS, anti-aliasing mode to supersampling, morphological filtering ON and set texture filtering quality to high. This will even make the text bearable.

And do not forget: thank UCyborg properly.

I can't believe how shoddy GOGs work was. Maybe they should ask you for advice.

---

PS
CAN A MODERATOR PLEASE MAKE THIS THREAD STICKY?

Edit 21/02/2017: updated AMD driver settings.
Post edited February 21, 2017 by Quantomas
Posted February 24, 2017
Thanks a lot for this, it works as intended! (Win10 with nVidia GPU here)

Too bad for the blurry text issue, it's not unreadable but when I still had a laptop with AMD GPU, with the alternate pixel fix, it was clearly better.

GOG's fixes actually worked well some time ago (years?), but apparently driver updates and such have made it unreliable :/ This new fix is definitely welcome.

Oh, here's the other link from UCyborg's first post, with the missing cinematic etc.: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2DPRdP0LBDGMC0yeng5Qkc1Mk0/view (scanned with ESET NOD32 antivirus, no threats).
Post edited February 24, 2017 by Darucas
Posted March 09, 2017
I agree with the one who said this should be stickied. I've tried most of the fixes on this forum for the last few months and finally this is what lets me play this gem again! (AMD processor, Windows 10)
Posted April 10, 2017
Nice to see it also works for other people! The blurry text is something I have yet to look into, can't promise anything, but if I figure something out, you can be sure I'll the update patch.

@Quantomas
Have you tried without messing with atiumdag.dll at all? The point of this patch was so people can stop experimenting with random fixes like dropping random graphics driver DLLs in game folder.

Actually, older games are still supported to some degree, it depends among other things on how they use function calls provided by DirectX to draw stuff on screen. Out-of-the box compatibility differs from game to game, plus newer Windows versions may make certain features required not work properly, for example the retro 256-color mode errors out on WIndows 8+. It can take a bit of creativity to get some game to work again. Certain graphics features also may not be present on recent graphics cards. Soulbringer doesn't utilize any missing functionality though.

Very useful software that helps with compatibility is dgVoodoo, which, in layman's terms, make an old game utilize newer under-the-hood technology for drawing. It can restore broken/missing functionality, Newer versions that support Soulbringer correctly can be found at http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=51790 Patched Soulbringer can work with or without dgVoodoo, but running it via dgVoodoo has its benefits.

With that said, putting random older graphics driver DLLs in game folder (atiumdag.dll) is a bad practice. atiumdag.dll is only one crucial graphical driver component and has dependencies on other components. Dependent components do not expect to be mixed with the older version you're putting in the game folder. Games NEVER talk to atiumdag.dll directly, so no fix should ever involve it, or any other driver DLL for that matter. Someone reported the following error:

"DDrawScreen:StartDraw : Failed to Lock front surface with DirectX error code 887601b3:
Access to this surface is refused because an attempt was made to lock the primary surface without DCI support."

This is example of what can happen when you do that. With just this patch, the game runs on my laptop with AMD Radeon R2 with Crimson drivers version 16.6, which is much more recent than Catalyst 12.8. Driver DLLs also differ depending on which generation of graphics cards they support, so something that old won't work at all on new cards.
Post edited April 10, 2017 by UCyborg
Posted April 23, 2017
I like your style. I've never gotten Soulbringer to work, on Win10 or otherwise, so this was my last search before asking for a refund. Hope it works!
Post edited April 23, 2017 by Sturleson
Posted May 22, 2017
Does this patch re-enable console mode?
Edit: I'm running Win7, so the game runs for me. Would the patch break the game for me?
Post edited May 22, 2017 by Tiandariel
Posted June 26, 2017
Thanks so much UCyborg for the post and information. If I understand the directions correctly, here's what I'm supposed to do:

- Install Soulbringer (from GOG)
- Download/extract compatibility patch into game folder
- Run reg fix
- download dgVoodoo (2.54); copy all three dll's from the MS folder into the Soulbringer installation folder

The above being done, I encounter an error when running Soulbringer.exe:

"DDrawEnumerator::DDrawEnumerator : Failed to Enumerate Direct Draw devices with DirectX error code 80004005; There is an undefined error condition."

I've also attached an image of the error message window. Here are my PC specs:

Windows 10
NVidia GeForce GTX 980 TI
16GB RAM DDR4
Intel Core i7 6700K

I've played around with the settings in the dgVoodoo control panel but can't seem to get it to work. Any thoughts?
Attachments:
errormsg.png (11 Kb)
Posted July 07, 2017
This is absolutely fantastic!

I'm playing on Windows 10 and through this compatibility patch and dgVoodoo I actually solved the text/font issue (didn't have performance problem in the first place), since the compatibility patch allows for dgVoodoo to work with the game, and dgVoodoo allows for the game to run on software rendering in Windows 10!

Yes - software rendering! It makes the text from barely readable to absolutely beautiful! You may think that running the game at 8 bit colour depth will make it look like shit, but no - the 3D graphics look the same and the 2D interface looks even better (because it suffers from the same rendering issue as the font).

For those struggling with installing the patch and dgVoodoo, here are the steps I took to get them to work.

1. Download the compatibility patch and dgVoodoo 2.54 (only this main zip is required) from the link in the main post.
2. Extract the compatibility patch zip; copy and paste the content of the extracted "Soulbringer" folder to the game installation folder, replacing some of the original game files.
3. Run "Disable_Soulbringer_Compat_Fixes.reg" and follow the prompts (click all the yeses) to apply the registry fix; then right-click on Soulbringer.exe, go to compatibility tab and click OK to cause Windows to register new settings. (This step may not be necessary if you have no problem running the game launcher "Soulbringer.exe".)
4. Look in the game installation folder for sft8lib.dll, D3D6Lib.dll or D3D7Lib.dll. If you see any of them, delete them (VERY IMPORTANT).
5. Unzip the dgVoodoo zip; copy "dgVoodooCpl.exe" and the content of the "MS" folder (NOT the folder itself) to the game installation folder.
6. Run dgVoodooCpl.exe, make sure you can find the game installation path in the dropdown list at the top. If not, click the ".\" button to add. You don't have to change any settings but under the general tab, I recommend that you change "Scaling mode" to "Stretched, keep Aspect Ratio". Under the DirectX tab, you can also untick "dgVoodoo Watermark" to make the ingame watermark disappear, but I recommend that you leave it while setting things up so that you can see whether dgVoodoo is in the work, and only untick the option after everything is working properly.
7. Start the game as usual. At the launcher screen click "Video" and change Driver to "Software". I recommend that you change Mode to 1024x768; anything smaller may make colour pixels obvious to the eye and anything larger may make the text too small to comfortably read. Go back and click "Advanced"; as per the instruction for the compatibility patch, "make sure the EAX option is disabled unless you're sure you have a working setup that supports running DirectSound3D games with EAX effects and EAX Unified is installed" (not sure how this applies to me but did it anyway).
8. The game should run beautifully now! You'll notice that the intro cinematic and the "Soulbring" loading screen will be completely black, if this bothers you, download the file from the last link in the main post and apply it to your game...

... and voila!
Post edited July 07, 2017 by fulton
Posted July 08, 2017
avatar
fulton: This is absolutely fantastic!

I'm playing on Windows 10 and through this compatibility patch and dgVoodoo I actually solved the text/font issue (didn't have performance problem in the first place), since the compatibility patch allows for dgVoodoo to work with the game, and dgVoodoo allows for the game to run on software rendering in Windows 10!

Yes - software rendering! It makes the text from barely readable to absolutely beautiful! You may think that running the game at 8 bit colour depth will make it look like shit, but no - the 3D graphics look the same and the 2D interface looks even better (because it suffers from the same rendering issue as the font).

For those struggling with installing the patch and dgVoodoo, here are the steps I took to get them to work.

1. Download the compatibility patch and dgVoodoo 2.54 (only this main zip is required) from the link in the main post.
2. Extract the compatibility patch zip; copy and paste the content of the extracted "Soulbringer" folder to the game installation folder, replacing some of the original game files.
3. Run "Disable_Soulbringer_Compat_Fixes.reg" and follow the prompts (click all the yeses) to apply the registry fix; then right-click on Soulbringer.exe, go to compatibility tab and click OK to cause Windows to register new settings. (This step may not be necessary if you have no problem running the game launcher "Soulbringer.exe".)
4. Look in the game installation folder for sft8lib.dll, D3D6Lib.dll or D3D7Lib.dll. If you see any of them, delete them (VERY IMPORTANT).
5. Unzip the dgVoodoo zip; copy "dgVoodooCpl.exe" and the content of the "MS" folder (NOT the folder itself) to the game installation folder.
6. Run dgVoodooCpl.exe, make sure you can find the game installation path in the dropdown list at the top. If not, click the ".\" button to add. You don't have to change any settings but under the general tab, I recommend that you change "Scaling mode" to "Stretched, keep Aspect Ratio". Under the DirectX tab, you can also untick "dgVoodoo Watermark" to make the ingame watermark disappear, but I recommend that you leave it while setting things up so that you can see whether dgVoodoo is in the work, and only untick the option after everything is working properly.
7. Start the game as usual. At the launcher screen click "Video" and change Driver to "Software". I recommend that you change Mode to 1024x768; anything smaller may make colour pixels obvious to the eye and anything larger may make the text too small to comfortably read. Go back and click "Advanced"; as per the instruction for the compatibility patch, "make sure the EAX option is disabled unless you're sure you have a working setup that supports running DirectSound3D games with EAX effects and EAX Unified is installed" (not sure how this applies to me but did it anyway).
8. The game should run beautifully now! You'll notice that the intro cinematic and the "Soulbring" loading screen will be completely black, if this bothers you, download the file from the last link in the main post and apply it to your game...

... and voila!
Thanks very much fulton for the detailed instructions. I completed your steps 1 through 6, and unfortunately, I still get the same "DDrawEnumerator" error noted in my previous post. No idea what's going on. After I close this error message window, the Launcher does load. However, when I click the Video menu item, the Driver drop-down doesn't have "Software" as an option. And then when I launch the game, I get the splash screens but eventually the DDraw error message returns and the game closes. Frustrating...
Posted July 10, 2017
avatar
paulnatzke: Thanks very much fulton for the detailed instructions. I completed your steps 1 through 6, and unfortunately, I still get the same "DDrawEnumerator" error noted in my previous post. No idea what's going on. After I close this error message window, the Launcher does load. However, when I click the Video menu item, the Driver drop-down doesn't have "Software" as an option. And then when I launch the game, I get the splash screens but eventually the DDraw error message returns and the game closes. Frustrating...
Seriously no software option? It's the first one in the dropdown list from what I can see.

The reply in this post may be relevant to your problem (you need to complete the spaces in the address with : or . ):
http //www neoseeker com/forums/1991/t194200-game-lockup-during-startup/#pagetop

What do you see in the folder mentioned in the reply? I have 4 files:

D3d6Lib.dll
D3d7Lib.dll
Sft8Filt.FTB
sft8lib.dll

I'm guessing the last two are responsible for software mode.

Hope this helps otherwise I'm at a loss.
Posted July 16, 2017
avatar
paulnatzke: Thanks very much fulton for the detailed instructions. I completed your steps 1 through 6, and unfortunately, I still get the same "DDrawEnumerator" error noted in my previous post. No idea what's going on. After I close this error message window, the Launcher does load. However, when I click the Video menu item, the Driver drop-down doesn't have "Software" as an option. And then when I launch the game, I get the splash screens but eventually the DDraw error message returns and the game closes. Frustrating...
avatar
fulton: Seriously no software option? It's the first one in the dropdown list from what I can see.

The reply in this post may be relevant to your problem (you need to complete the spaces in the address with : or . ):
http //www neoseeker com/forums/1991/t194200-game-lockup-during-startup/#pagetop

What do you see in the folder mentioned in the reply? I have 4 files:

D3d6Lib.dll
D3d7Lib.dll
Sft8Filt.FTB
sft8lib.dll

I'm guessing the last two are responsible for software mode.

Hope this helps otherwise I'm at a loss.
Correct...no Software option in the Video dropdown box. But again, even before that, I get that pesky DDraw Enumerator error message. Just for kicks, I went into dgVoodoo, into the DirectX menu and checked the very first box to disable and passthru to real DirectX. Doing this, the game runs as normal...meaning none of the dgVoodoo settings appear to take hold (windowed mode, for example).

I also noticed that, occasionally, the file "dgVoodooCpl.exe" would disappear from the Soulbringer install directory. I read a post where it had previously been detected as malware, and I do have Malware Bytes running. I just added it as an exclusion. I already have it added to McAfee as a exclusion. Not sure if any of this should result in the issue I'm experiencing.

To answer your other question, those four files do exist in the stated directory. In my case, since I'm using GOG Galaxy to control the install, that location is C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Soulbringer\data\Stealth\Render.

When I delete the two "Dsd" files in the Render directory, the Video option in the startup configuration box is completely empty. To me, this appears to say that the program is not pointing at the Render directory, since the two "sft" files are presumably the software driver.

I'm going to keep experimenting...thanks again for your input.
Pages:
1
2
This is my favourite topic
Community
SoulbringerNew patch for better compatibility with modern systems(17 posts)(17 posts)
(17 posts)