Great Gonzo's After I posted I found this Forum Topic. Thank you guys so much for finding a fix. Maybe I can return to the Steel Panthers field of Battle now..
I have the game working fine with the win7 fix for the game in win7. Do all of you get the same resolution in the game? It looks like a 800x600, its not really sharp like it was when I had it on an old machine.
You are correct, I have a 24" widescreen ASUS lcd monitor, works great but not as sharp as the old crt monitors on this game. Do you agree that's what happens?
Absolutely. LCD's only look good at their full resolution.
When the 800x600 resolution is "stretched" to fill the full screen on an LCD, the pixels have to be "interpolated" to the closest approximation of the actual image, so it's a garbled image.
On the CRT, the size of the monitor's pixels actually changes to keep a 1 pixel to 1 pixel relationship for a true 800x600 image, just with larger pixels than what you would have with the monitor set to 1280x1024 for instance.
Plug one of your old CRT's in and see if it works better.
I do have the game still on my older computer which is set up right behind me. I can't remember now how it looks. It would be great if this game had high resolution to at least 1200x whatever number they use. It doesn't look real bad when I play the game but I always liked the crispness of the game and I don't have that with a 24 inch monitor running at 1920x1080
I can confirm that setting the core affinity to use the second core of a dual-core cpu seems to alleviate the artillery screen lag on my Win7 laptop. It won't fix it entirely. Just setting it to a singe core affinity or to use the first core won´t help. Using the imagecfg program with the command "imagecfg -a 0x2 mech.exe" edits the executable to run on the second core. You have to do this in the windows command line promt.
As for the color fix the direct draw compatibility tool does fix the colors, but it does not fix the colors immediately upon starting the game. You need to choose single player and go to the edit screen. Then the colors should look normal.
I have not yet tested the dll fix by NCrawler, but it may be the best fix. There have been a couple of dll fixes to other games in the past. I believe they are called direct draw wrappers and use a modified ddraw.dll file... There are source codes availanle for some of those projects.
Rosollia try holding down the SHIFT Button Prior to selecting ANYTHING from the Artillery screen, that will/should cut down a lot of the delay probs. FWIW
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"As Pogo said, 'We have met the enemy and he is us' "
While reading a topic in the spwaw enhanced forum I came across an even simpler way to setup the core affinity. This method does not reguire the imagecfg program. It is probably better too because you do not need to edit the actual exe file in any way. You are just using build-in Windows commands to temporarily set the game to run on the second core. This way if you do not like the results you can just start the game normaly the next time.
Instructions: Just copy this text below...
start /B /WAIT /AFFINITY 2 mech.exe
...to notepad and save it as AffinityFix.cmd (The .cmd part is important!) to the same folder where your mech.exe file is. (The main folder of the game.) Then when you want to start the game double-click on this newly created file and the game should then run on the core no.2 and your artillery screen should be more responsive.
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They should change the name of this game to "Steel Agates" because that's what it takes to have a game advertised for sale at $80 that not only gets zero support from the publisher, but wouldn't even run at all on the latest version of Windows (or the one before that) without a user created fix.
I had the same problems with Windows 7 64bit (Home Premium). Running the game in compatibility mode didn't solve the color problems. I then deactivated Aero and switched to Windows basic / classic design - and the color problems were 99% gone (with only a few weird pixels here and there).
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Tried this but it did not work. Clearly I am doing something wrong. When I click on the zip file the screen flashes, a dos screen appear momentarily and then nothing. Any thoughts?
Try searching at the Depot and/or Enhanced (in my sig). There are a bunch of ideas to get it working right for you. I'm still using XP so haven't got personal experience with W7 fixes but I follow the threads.
< Message edited by JEB Davis -- 1/27/2014 9:12:19 PM >
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Thanks JEB, I used to have an account there (at the depot) but it has been deactivated. I tried creating a new one but they won't accept web mail, which is all I use any more (gmail, comcast, yahoo, etc.) so I don't know how to post there.
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Beta Tester for: Flashpoint Campaigns: Sudden Storm War in the East 1 & 2 WarPlan & WarPlan Pacific Valor & Victory DG CWIE 2 SPWW2 & SPMBT scenario creator
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Joined: 2/23/2009 From: United States Status: offline
Still no joy. I can use either the win7spww2 script or the D3D but both run in 800x600 mode and no amount of tweaking with D3D will change the screen resolution, not sure why.
I know there has not been any development on this for many years and the code has fallen by the way side.
Currently I am programming in java, but I know C and C++, but I don't know who to contact at Matrix to see if they are even interested in updating this code so users don't have to go to all the pains to make it work.
Due to SPWAW not being supported over the last 10 or so years I switched to playing SPWW2 by the Camo group since they (and Shrapnel Games) have continuously updated the code and have made it windows friendly (w7 and w8).
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Beta Tester for: Flashpoint Campaigns: Sudden Storm War in the East 1 & 2 WarPlan & WarPlan Pacific Valor & Victory DG CWIE 2 SPWW2 & SPMBT scenario creator
No way to increase the resolution of Steel Panthers World at War it is always at 800x600. It is a limitation of the old game.
However I have compiled a small fix that contains the script to run the game in processor core #2 and fix the artillery screen lag. The second part of the fix is Aqrit's ddwrapper that solves the color bug on Windows Vista & 7.
"You are not allowed to post links for 7 days from the date of your tenth post."
I cant post the link because I get this message. Rest assured I am not going to post ten times just to be able to post a link... sorry.
I quess we can thank the spammers for these strict rules.
Anyway the fix would contain a .cmd batch file with the command "start /REALTIME /AFFINITY 2 mech.exe" and Aqrit's ddwrapper configured with the ColorFix = 1 option. So if you have some computing skills you can easily compile the fix from that information.
Also if you google "DxWnd" you should find a link to Sourceforge for an interesting project that enables you to run many old games using a directdraw / direct3d wrapper. This in an eveolution of the older D3DWindower program. It is not that simple to use since it has no manual but with some trial and error one can figure it out.
Someone here may need this info it is about what to do it you loose explorer and you don't want to reboot. Press CNTRL + ALT + Delete to bring up the task manager then click on the "NEW TASK" tab at the bottom right of the task manager window that pops up then type in explorer.exe and click OK - this brings back your desktop. I read it somewhere on the internet.
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There is a Peace that is only found at the other end of War.
Some additional information regarding the SPWAW artillery screen bug and the multi core cpu fix.
Previously it has been noted that you need to start SPWAW with the command: start /B /WAIT /AFFINITY 2 mech.exe
This should fix the unresponsive artillery screen on modern multi core cpu systems. The command AFFINITY 2 sets the game to run on the SECOND core of the processor.
However I have seen that for some people this does not work. It may be that if you have a 4 core system you might actualy need to set up the game so that it runs on the FOURTH core. To do this you should use the command: start /B /WAIT /AFFINITY 8 mech.exe
Likewise if you have a 6 core processor you might need to set the game to launch on the SIXTH core with the command: start /B /WAIT /AFFINITY 20 mech.exe and so on...
You can also experiment with all the different AFFINITY values to find out which one (if any) works for your system. The full formula for setting the AFFINITY is as follows:
P.S. You might wonder why CPU-3 uses the AFFINITY value 4 instead of 3. Or why CPU-4 uses the AFFINITY value 8 and so on. This is because the AFFINITY value is actualy derived from a binary number that is then converted into a hexadecimal value.
P.P.S. If you do not know how many CPU cores your computer has you can open the command promt and type in the command: wmic cpu get NumberOfCores This should then display the number of cpu cores.
< Message edited by Riitaoja -- 4/10/2015 3:31:56 PM >
Followed all the steps, but still get the crazy color scheme when I run the program using the win7spwaw.cmd file. Is there any other setting that must be adjusted when using the Windows 7 system? Thanks.
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RE: Windows 7 *GUARANTEED* fix - 
After I posted I found this Forum Topic.
Thank you guys so much for finding a fix.
Maybe I can return to the Steel Panthers field of Battle now..
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