No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

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PacMani
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No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by PacMani »

Hi there,

so on Windows 8 you can forget almost every old DirectX game if you want to run it in fullscreen. I stumbled the technical details up, to sum it up the new DWM of Windows 8 can't be turned off which could've helped, old games are emulated by whatever and eventually end up being drawn by the CPU at some stage when it comes to displaying the rendered stuff.

This causes heavy lag (1 FPS per Second) in GTA2 if you want to run it in fullscreen! In windowed mode everything is ok and in the same speed as in Windows 7 or earlier.
The same behavior is seen in other old games like Worms and some unknown ones.
A fix to set some Direct_Draw_ (lol) compatibility flags in the registry does not help here as it does in old Direct_Draw_ games (yeah, not D3D, so no wonder though).

The best thing here would be to have a fake fullscreen which just removes the window border and positions and resizes the window of GTA so that it fills the whole screen.
Did anyone do this yet? At the moment I always set my taskbar to auto-hide and then dock the GTA2 window at the top border which gives a mostly fullscreen result:
Image

Another nasty thing is that whenever the GTA2 window gets focus back, it restores itself from the maximized state to normal.
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Re: No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by Sektor »

My only Windows 8 machine has an ancient 4MB PCI video card and GTA2 runs fast fullscreen (I think faster than XP/Windows 7 ran with that card).

There are many programs for resizing windows and saving their sizes but I don't use any. If someone knows a good one then write a GTA2 guide for it.
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Re: No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by PacMani »

Yeah, however that program should also be able to remove the window border :(
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Re: No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by Sektor »

Some can make it transparent. There is probably one that can hide the border too.
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Re: No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by elypter »

i made this tool about a year ago
http://gtamp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=244
you have to hide the taskbar yourself if you dont want to see it though
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Re: No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by PacMani »

Hmm thats better yet, though it continues to beep after it resized the GTA2 window.
Isn't there an AutoIt API call that removes the window border and put it top most? I would not have to auto hide my taskbar then and the window border is not stealing pixels from the maximum allowed window size.
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Re: No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by elypter »

you can add/subtract/move the window so the borders are out of the screen. i didnt find a way to remove the window title&border but maybe it works in a newer version/OS. the beeping must be some kind of windows specific bug. it didnt beep when i used it on winxp or win7.
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Re: No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by PacMani »

yeah, well im playing around in ollydbg to get the correct window style flags set
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Re: No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?

Post by PacMani »

Fixed the window restoring itself from the maximized state when getting focus.
0xE0AFF 75 --> EB
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