I bought and play Swat3 here last year.
the game is amazing,but it didn't work right at first,i got really low fps and crashes.I had to install dgvoodoo to get it to work.
reinstall the game today and the same problem still exists...
buying old games on GOG should means I don't have to worry about things like this.
fix the game if you want to sell it

Ditto for me. I had to do the same. It was disappointing since GOG games are supposed to work out-of-the-box on modern systems. I agree with your sentiment. Nice game, anyway.

The problem is modern versions of Windows only emulate 16 bit colour mode. They would need to have the game's source code to rewrite the game to work in modern 32-bit colour. Really this is a Microsoft problem of not properly supporting legacy games.

dgVoodoo2 is a great tool that helps with this issue. Unfortunately, with older games using utilities like this is our only choice.

The game is dying, It's going to get to where you simply can't fix it, like Saints Row 2, or Rogue Spear.

P.S if it's any consolation, I did send a message to both Ken Williams and Phil Spencer of Microsoft Games (the current owner of the Sierra library since they bought activision, who bought vivendi, who bought Sierra...ugh).

Don't hold your breath on a response though :P

Edit: Got the game working properly on Arch Linux via Wine, for it to work on wine you need both the indeo codecs and the "directshow" package from winetricks installed, now it plays cutscenes and works.

Another enhancement, Ken Williams did in fact get back to me, the source code for swat 3 is lost @Slippery_Jim

Jim, why not modify the mission files so they simply never invoke the videos? is that not possible?

That would be nearly as good of a fix as having source code, we got the dev tools for swat 3 obviously, that means the only video that could crash the game would be the opening sierra.avi, and it's easily bypassed with a bat file.

Activision had the source code last as far as I know. They wouldn't even consider releasing it without a developer going through the code to make sure there weren't any copyrighted 3rd party tools source code in it (ie Blink video etc). Considering the game is from 1999 that seems like a silly excuse. We even had the old Swat 3 community manager ask about this to no success.

I imagine by now it is probably lost as you say.

As for bypassing the movies entirely, yes this is probably possible with a hex editor hack. Deleting or renaming the movies probably works just as well. The annoying thing is that so many people don't have problems with the movie and would be such a shame to cripple the game.

Some people still have crashes after they replace the movies with a re-encoded modern codec version. I wonder if those people have computer/video card combos that can't display 640x480. I have an unreleased feature of the Last Resort mod that plays the videos in the same resolution that you choose for the 2D menus. So, for instance, if you play the game in 1920x1080 the game will display a re-encoded AI enhanced 1920x1080 version of the movie. Same with 800x600, and 1366x768.

The problem is I don't have a "crashing" Swat 3 computer to test this feature out on. All of my machines behave with the re-encoded original movies.