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Now I don't run Starcraft under Win 7 but plenty of people do, judging by the colour glitching in the streams under the tl.net calendar bar. What's happened is that Microsoft screwed up their Direct Draw emulation and a bunch of late 1990s Windows games (Starcraft, Warcraft 2, Wing Commander and Fallout 1/2) now have screwed up colours.
Well very recently, some enterprising Finnish bloke has gone and supposedly fixed it with a hack of the direct draw dll, and now all your old Windows games can now appear in their former 256-colour glory. You can find the hack here.
I've not run it, obviously, but I saw it at rockpapershotgun, and I thought I'd point you guys at it, since it's hopefully of some use to one or more of you diehard BroodWar4lifers out there plugging away at your iCCup ranking like Real (Wo-)Men while the rest of us fickle Starcraft 2 feebs master our Facebook Integration skills and display our meaningless and ridiculous achievements, like the shallow and disloyal consumer whores we obviously are.
Hope this helps...
Aim
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Wow this worked ty so much for that link
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thanks!!! I'll try this as soon as I get home
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Awesome, this fixed my crash on startup issues with BW on Windows 7 
Thanks for the post.
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Probably should have used an exclamation point instead of a question mark - lol. nice find
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On September 09 2010 00:12 gogogadgetflow wrote:
Probably should have used an exclamation point instead of a question mark - lol. nice find
Nope.
Since he's assumption that it works it's totally hypothetical. He has not tried or tested said hack.
BOOYAH.
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On September 08 2010 23:59 vek wrote:Awesome, this fixed my crash on startup issues with BW on Windows 7 Thanks for the post.
Sick, I'm going to try it now :D, will report back!
edit:On September 08 2010 23:59 vek wrote:Awesome, this fixed my crash on startup issues with BW on Windows 7 Thanks for the post.
Can you share what settings your starcraft.exe has for it's properties(if any)?
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Results:
My BW went from playing in widescreen to having black bars on the sides of the screen, quite a pain.
When you try to log on the b.net SC sort of "goes small", in the fashion that it turns in to a small black 640x480 window in the top left of the screen. It also, however, keeps it maximized, but a bunch of things are missing from the maximized part of the screen and you can't use that interface anyway.
In game my mouse flies to the top of the screen randomly and I can't move it down. I can't click anything either. Definitely not playable.
Sluggish/laggy at the start
Doesn't seem to work well for me at all...
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Croatia9565 Posts
I think all those with Win7 that are playing BW should do a little beta testing and just write your results here (like Grobyc did^^).
Then we should mail the author of this fix, redirect him to this thread and ask for his kind assistance to make it work 100%.
Apparently, from reading his site, he wrote this fix with having specifically Wing Commanders in mind so side-effect are bound to happen with Starcraft. But I think with little tweaking he should be able to make it work in Starcraft as well.
Messed up colors are insignificant problem when compared to the BW freezing your whole computer, but from my understanding (source), DirectDraw is the main culprit for both problems.
It would be awesome if this gets finally fixed!
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I am having the exact same problems as Grobyc. I also feel that it switches screens a bit slower.
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attention windows 7 users: this may sound stupid....but do it ( this is the fix i used )
-right click on the desktop while starcraft is not running
-select screen resolution and leave the screen resolution window open
-now start the game
-enjoy life
-maybe buy a beer for me
EDIT: you do not need any compatiblity or color settings, so clear those if u changed em up
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Croatia9565 Posts
Also, it would be nice if mods kept the posts like the one above mine out of this thread. Those kind of solutions were discussed to death over several threads (eg. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=93382 ).
While it is correct that some of these techniques works for some users it is NOT a real solution. It may fix the colors problem (again, to SOME users), but it doesn't fix a crashing problem.
It was proven by few people more informed than me on the topic (source) that the problem is Windows7's compatibility issues with DirectDraw applications.
The step to the real solution is the originals post content, Direct Draw hack, and it would be nice if discussion remained about that.
Now I know that most of this site doesn't even play BW anymore, quite a few never did actually (source: poll on the right), but to those who still does this could be huge. I know it may sound silly to some, but this crashing problem is the ONLY reason I switched back to XP from Win7.
It'd also be nice if this thread was moved to BW General section, because some people don't even read Tech Support forum (ie. they have it minimized).
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I just built/upgraded 4 machines to run SC2. I left everything in Vista so we could still play Broodwar. I would have preferred to purchase Win 7 instead of Vista Home Premium (which was actually harder to find at a reasonable price than you would think). So the color problem with Broodwar actually hurts a lot of people. Why doesn't Blizzard just release a service pack or sell a fix? I would buy 4 tomorrow. Easy money. Or a classic Broodwar Gold that runs on Win 7 only. Or something imaginative like that. I'm ranting now so I will sit back down...
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I just tried this, and had no success. The whole SC:BW main screen went 80% black, and the mouse is lagging. Anyone else had their game react like this to the hack?
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who cares about colours when the game crashes every 5 minutes?
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On September 10 2010 05:51 2Pacalypse- wrote:
Also, it would be nice if mods kept the posts like the one above mine out of this thread. Those kind of solutions were discussed to death over several threads
sorry i really didnt know there were that many threads about the color issue, this is what works for me on my windows 7 pc. all im doing is passing some knowledge that might help someone. i guess in the future i will search for and read all related threads concerning something i might post about.
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On September 10 2010 03:08 Grobyc wrote:Show nested quote +On September 08 2010 23:59 vek wrote:Awesome, this fixed my crash on startup issues with BW on Windows 7 Thanks for the post. Sick, I'm going to try it now :D, will report back! edit: Show nested quote +On September 08 2010 23:59 vek wrote:Awesome, this fixed my crash on startup issues with BW on Windows 7 Thanks for the post. Can you share what settings your starcraft.exe has for it's properties(if any)?
Sorry for not getting back sooner but here are the settings I use:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.
ICCUP Launcher:
Chaos Plugin - checked
Lan Latency - checked
Window mode - unchecked
Starcraft.exe compatibility options:
Force 640x480 resolution - checked
Run as Administrator - checked
Everything else - unchecked
ddhack.cfg contents:
altwinpos
Just so people know. I was getting fairly constant crashes and colour problems before using ddhack. I would crash anywhere between 5 mins or an hour of playing the game. Using ddhack I have played through the entire vanilla campaign and almost all of the BW campaign without a single crash.
I can play games on iCCup fine but there are some display issues with the battle.net screens. They are not severe enough to effect usage though.
The game does crash when you exit the entire thing but.. who cares about that. I just spam esc/enter and it closes.
Edit: To the people having fps issues with ddhack - Have you tried limiting starcraft.exe to only run on a single core in task manager? I have a feeling that would fix the problem.
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This fixes the colours for me, but when I get into multiplayer everything is lodged in the top left of my screen. All the text. The game is still fullscreened, and all the images are in the right position, but all the text is at the top left. Also if I make it into a game my cursor locks at the top and I am perma scrolling.
What is it I have done to anger this program? ):
Edit: Read threads before you post in them. Always. D:
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Crashes I agree are far worse than the colors (which can be kludge fixed by killing explorer.exe, as has been discussed before). For me all the crashes have been done away with by setting starcraft.exe's affinity with task manager to a single core.
Of course if this DLL could obviate the need to do that, that would be swell. Just pointing out that in the meantime there are ways to play, that have worked for some people at least
:off topic: his site thanks the Wing Commander CIC. Man fuck those guys. They are like the Brood War elitists of this forum (like me) only far far worse. If they disagree with something a newbie says, rather than wait for him to come around they'll disregard untold hours of work said newbie has put in to a project for the community and fuck him over while trash talking him and his motivation. Sort of ruined my day seeing that place mentioned I sort of hoped it had withered up and gone away
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My starcraft crashes upon start when I use the ddhack: doesn't matter if I start ICCUP or stand-alone starcraft, doesn't matter if I use kill-explorer bat file before hand, doesn't matter if I mess around with compatibility settings...I don't even get to the starcraft scene as Windows pops-out and tells it's "searching for the solution" to the crash.
I currently have altwinpos in ddhack config file.
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EPT
