Left 4 Dead 2 Smartsteamemu

[Dorothy Gouldie]

Topicabout mixed new supported games (you'll see that they are NOT new games, but on the contrary quite old glories!).

First one: you you have children, you should love this one: Payuta and the Ice God

Use the attached export, I had to tweak several flags about the palette handling on GDI, but it should work almost ok (currently, I just have one of the four mini-games that is not working), maybe with some crackled sound.

Another one: Rampage World Tour.

This one still requires some work to eliminate a few strange tweaks to make it running, I hope I will be able to post a valid export sooner or later. The game is promising, it has CD music that works perfectly emulated by DxWnd.

Rampage W.T. is a case stranger than expected.

I installed it from a CD image and WineVDM to run the 16bit installer. Then I extracted the audio tracks and moved to the Music folder. Finally, I had to set reduced color mode 16bit to rampagew.exe.

The game runs (often, not always!) with the attached configuration. Beware: this way the game believes to be running in window mode, but if you type Alt-Enter to switch to fullscreen mode then the game crashes!

But what puzzles me is the fact that the game can run without reduced color mode and a different configuration, but it crashes quite more often (sometimes with puzzling messages like error code 0) and it is impossible to debug with OllyDBG because when the debugger is attached the game crashes before.

I should be wary of old small games: this "Loony Labyrinth Pinball" (p.s. visit MyAbandonware) seemed a simple challenge, but ...

First the installer didn't work. I run it using WinveVDM, perfect tool for 16 bit installers.

But the installer didn't go to the end: at the last step it claimed that a file was missing and I had to quit. As a result, I got all game files, but the installer didn't set the registry entries.

So, the game was almost working, but I had to guess all necessary registry values and put them inside the fake registry. The game uses an old and forgotten function RegSetValueA (not to be confused with the modern and used version RegSetValueExA) so in order to get the necessary logs I also had to add a wrapper to DxWnd to dump the values.

At last, I got the game working! Not all registry values are set properly, but if anyone wants to complete the job, he is welcome! In my fake registry settings the game is registered (by "gho", of course!) and uses the following keys:

Z - left flipper

M - right flipper

SHIFT - plunger

SPACE - nudge

The gameplay is nothing unexpected (it's a pinball, what else?) but the game could be an interesting gym for experiments with legacy audio (wav, midi and all this stuff ..).

In addition, the game comes with two different versions, almost identical. I checked the IAT, and the only difference seems to be the usage of an extra call in user32.dll. What for???

Enjoy.

Always on the pinball cathegory but this time a more recent one: "SlamIt Pinball Big Score" is a 2009 game that mixes D3D9 and OpenGL. Furtunately, this time the mix is not explosive like sometimes happens and the game is a beauty in high resolution and scalable window.

Thank you very much.

Analyzing the registry dump I see that my configuration files don't miss that much, but I also see that I made some confusion between the concept of registry subkey and field. The practical effect is that a file like this can't be cut & pasted in the fake registry panel.

I make an example: DxWnd logs shows this error:

Obviously, regedit is correct, DxWnd is wrong. DxWnd treats the subkey as if it was a field.

This would require some adjustement in DxWnd logic, but I think that the possibility to import a regedit dump file will be very useful. Well, next release, maybe.

Something new and (hopefully) easy: Cycling Manager 4, ready to run with default settings.

In a screenshot you can see an evident clipping of the cyclist, but I checked: the game in native mode behaves the same.

I'm still having trouble with exporting "Loony Labyrinth Pinball (C). Dxw" (and S) on Win7.

With this export, only 1 intro image (Little Wing) with the wrong color palette will be displayed.

If I enable "Initial virtual color setting" - 8 BPP I can see all 3 intro images, but the color palette is wrong. The color palette directly in the game is fine. The situation with (S) is different. The color palette is fine, but the intro image Little Wing is distorted. If I enable "Initial virtual color setting" - 8 BPP I can see all 3 intro images in the correct color palette, but the first two are distorted.

I know this is not a fundamental problem, but it suggests that something is wrong.

Some idea?

Please, remind me about this when this covid19 stuff will be over. At the moment, my Win7 computer is locked into an unreacheable office and I'm not going to volunteer to get back to my desk. I'm working from home, but I'm surrounded by Win10 computers only!

A new entry, weird enough to deserve some mention: "Bone Out from Boneville" is a dx8 adventure game that curiously requires "Hot patch" flag to start, otherwise it hangs DxWnd and makes it necessary to kill DxWnd.exe since the game is not listed in the processes list.

That's fine, but curious: the Hot Patch flag usually gives troubles when you set it, not when it's unset!

i remember owning ths game, at one point, back when telltale games had thier website running, and i was buying their games, via the wesbite, and not steam (the early days of the walking dead video game, which is what telltale games were most famous for). There was also a sequel to this game, it was called "The Great Cow Race", so you may want to try and find out where to grab this too.

also both games, were available on steam, at some point, but have now been removed from sales, there are still steam store pages, available for them , but not buyable ( i think they got de-listed from steam, when telltale games shut down, in the last year or so).

EDIT: i have just found out, i still have these games, in my steam games list, and they are still downloadbale and playable (must have bought them, around a certain time period), didn't even know i had them. So, i could send you the contents, of one of them... I think the great cow race was only around 250mbish.

Unfortunately, the cow race seems to depend on Steam somehow: trying to run it without produces a "Steam error". It's not the typical Steam protection error (the game doesn't even link Steam libraries), the error code 2:0000065558 doesn't tell much (2 could be a file-not-found errorcode or whatever, 65558 could be a -24 in some unsigned short format).

Even worse, the DxWnd log doesn't show any attempt to open a file, check a device or access a registry key.

At a better glance, the game tries to load a missing (here) Steam.dll. The library is searched in the game folder and, in case of error, in any father folder going upward up to the root drive C:. Adding a fake Steam.dll in the game folder changes the error code, that means that this is the cause.

Maybe you have a Steam.dll somewhere.

for me, if i added a Steam.dll file to the game folder, if Steam is running in the background(bare in mind the renamed Steam.dll file is still there), the game runs successfully, with steam shut down, game fails to run but no errors show.

The protection seems to be tricky (would you think otherwise?). Steam.dll is not in the game folder, it is not statically linked to the game (like stram_api.dll) and if you provide a fake dll the protection ticks even before trying to load any named function call. Probably it's something in the dll DLLMain call that is invoked automatically at the dll loading. And almost for sure the dll talks to the game and Steam in some cyphered way. Clever.

Well, this particular protection is cracked almost daily I think (by looking at the many uploads on various sites). Not sure if anyone currently busy with this stuff is reading this thread though. I also hope no one will be bothered that it gets disscussed here in the first place.

@huh: good hint. I saw it before, but I was deceived by the size, too similar to the size of the game demo. This one must be Telltale's original version. Anyway, I don't think this is abandonware yet, so let's not pubblicize it too much (in any case, it's not so hard to find ... ;)

@Snow White: very interesting piece of software, it could be useful. I don't think it may apply on this case since it seems to provide a good emulation for steam_api.dll protection that, I think, should be different from steam.dll. In any case, I'm not going to tart a fight against Steam, I have this feeling that they wouldn't approve ...

yes, the steam versions, i had (yes, they are telltale's original versions), that i later on uninstalled, due to my PC at that time(omg, back in 2013/2014), crashing, and failing, and me forgetting about these games. BTW, i do remember having bought the non-steam original Telltale Games versions, from their website, wish i still had them now.

Then later on down the road, Telltale Games deciding to shut down, and then steam de-listing them from the steam client itself, looks like they were de-listed sometime in 2018/2019, YET, the games are still listed on the SteamDB website, enableing you to re-install your old games, because you bought them before they were de-listed. Would these games (Bone 1 & TGCRace) still be classed as abandonware in a way ?

@Snow White: i took a look at this SmartSteamEmu tool, it works well with Bone: Out From Boneville, and also Bone: The Great Cow Race. The only thing thats needed to run the games, is the target path, of the executables (or just drag n drop the game's executable file into the tool's window), and the game's steam app id's, and flag "Inject SmartSteamEmu". Both games run fine with it.

Another crazy oldie: Gooch Grundy's X-Decathlon, available at the Internet Archive Software Collection. It is a crazy nonsensical collection of mini-games that seem really stupid but can become soon addictive. The game is one of the Windows oldest ones (1997!) and shows several problems, but it is also perfectly playable. It is afun both for game players and for bugs hunters!

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