Playing Grim Fandango on a modern PC

[lanux128]

on a slow day, i tried installing an old favourite just to see if it will run on my WinXP SP3 with 8600GT. everything went well except for sprites which looks 'striped' like in the screenshot. Manny Calavera looks like he's been through a shredder.

i googled but most of the advices are about setting Win98-compatibility, copying files to the hard-disk and disabling the multiprocessor/hyperthreading settings. i believe my problem is graphics-related and was wondering if anyone else has had any luck with other golden oldies and therefore may lend a hand here.. btw, i had also fiddled with the anti-alias setting (plus some others as well) within nvidia's control panel but to no avail.

[Deozaan]

I'm not sure if this would even help, but did you try DOS Box?

[lanux128]

i thought of DOSBox also but this is a win32 game so there's not much DOSBox can do, i guess..

[Ampa]

It is related to the nVidia drivers and anti-aliasing, but it seems that the newer drviers simply aren't compatible.

Your only options would be to run it in software mode (rather than hardware acceleration), or to install some old nVidia drivers that use the old antialiasing technique.

[lanux128]

Your only options would be to run it in software mode (rather than hardware acceleration), or to install some old nVidia drivers that use the old antialiasing technique.

thanks, software mode makes it even worse (see pic) but i may have found a solution by disabling hardware acceleration from within DXDiag but its quite cumbersome to disable each time.

[Lashiec]

If it's related to antialiasing, perhaps you can create a profile for Grim Fandango in the control panel for nVidia drivers with the option to not use antialiasing at all, if such thing is possible.

[lanux128]

sorry it might not be clear in the OP but i already tried a creating a profile and fiddled a bit with the settings but was unsuccessful. right now, i'm manually turning off 'DirectDraw' (from the dxdiag applet) before playing to which the game responds better than changing to 'software' mode within the game..



edit: fixed typo and added screenshot.

[f0dder]

FWIW: the corrupted screenshots you posted don't look much like the bug I fixed in the XCOM games. There's both a DirectDraw and an accelerated (D3D?) version?

[lanux128]

AFAIK there is only one version, hardware support (D3D) was already incorporated within the engine (maybe SCUMM). if i enable 'hardware acceleration' the sprites are corrupted as in the OP but software mode introduces horizontal scanning lines as in the 2nd screenshot.

just remembered that later on there was a patch but it was more to fixing in-game bugs..

[lanux128]

from this thread here, there's a user who explains the problem quite clearly, i must say..

Edit: I should have mentioned, both Grim Fandango and Quake 3 used to play fine for me on XP. Since I'd last played them, I've updated my graphics card to an 8800 GTS, though, so I assume that's caused both these games to stop working. On my old graphics card, Quake 3 would play fine out the box, and Grim Fandango would play as long as I used dxdiag to turn off 3D acceleration. But this is one of those things that seems to vary considerably from machine to machine, depending on what hardware you're running. Damn Nvidia drivers...

Source: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1028235&r=16260690#r16260690

[lanux128]

after some time playing Grim Fandango with disabled hardware acceleration, i must say that i'm quite happy with the performance and the graphics quality. i wrote this program to toggle that setting before and after the game so that i don't have to do it manually each time. so i'm putting up Grim DirectDraw Fix (GrimDDFix) for download in case someone like me has a need for it. happy gaming