Eseguire giochi basati su DirectX 8 e precedenti su Windows 10 e 11 ~ il caso Railroad Tycoon 3 e le dgVoodoo 2

Welcome back to the lab! Every now and then the nostalgic streak takes over, and you get the urge to play old glories on the PC. In fact, I think many of us have played titles like the Age of Empires saga, Stronghold, Civilization, and many others in the past. Timeless games in terms of gameplay and style of play, were it not for one small but not insignificant problem, namely the ability to run these games on the latest operating systems, which many times seems to give the idea that it is impossible to pull them off the shelf and play them again as in the past, as over time many features required in pre-DirectX9 titles have been removed.

With VMs (Virtual Machines), a buffer to this limitation can be put in place, where generally installing Windows XP can be played, albeit reduced in windowing and with limited support for GPU features (such as 3D acceleration, a heavy limitation of VirtualBox and other virtualisation systems). This solution, however, requires hardware capable of supporting a virtualised operating system and a not inconsiderable amount of skill, for often unsatisfactory performance.

Several titles find an effective solution in enabling DirectPlay, found in the legacy components of the operating system's advanced features (accessible from the control panel)

DirectPlay is part of the DirectX API set. It is a network communication library, crucial in older games (e.g. Stronghold or Civilization III), whose support ceased by default with Windows 8, although it is still possible to manually re-enable it.

For all other titles, especially older ones such as the Caesar saga or Railroad Tycoon, DirectPlay is not enough, as DirectX pre-9 is missing, which is not supported by modern graphics cards, and this is where dgVoodoo2comes in, a set of old graphics APIs used up until Windows Vista, transformed into direct3d 11 and 12 (the standard ones in Windows 10 and 11), made open source and regularly updated to implement more and more titles, as well as implemented to make them usable on modern hardware

How do they work?

Well, nostalgia has gone rogue and made me want to play an old railway management game again, namely RailRoad Tycoon 3discovering that even the Steam version requires components that Windows 11 does not have, for example DirectX 8.1, so I started studying different solutions, and after several failures I came to try the aforementioned dgVoodoo2 (named after the historical GPU that revolutionised PC gaming with DirectX 6 and a new hardware acceleration).

The functioning is very simple.
Via the previously linked site, download the Steam ‘.dll’ files (you can copy the one in the client's installation folder) and DirectX components as well as the dgVoodooCpl.exeand dgVoodoo.conf by inserting them directly into the folder with the game executable

Starting dgVoodooCpl.exe will open a configuration window, where the following parameters must be entered as shown in the image:

Under VRAM select 1024 MB (one Gb video memory)

Enter the resolution of your monitor or its submultiples (the latter in the case of 2K monitors or higher)

Deactivate dgVoodoo's watermark

When finished, click ‘Apply’ and then ‘ok’.

The game can thus be started regularly from the Steam client, and the first step is to deactivate hardware acceleration for the mouse pointer and ‘hardware T & L’ where present (hardware transform and lighting, shifts the graphics processing of effects such as lighting from the processor to the video card)

If present, activate anti-aliasing and v-sync (vertical frame synchronisation) and you are ready to play!

Bonus hint

If you are using a Linux operating system with Steam and Proton you can run this game natively, if not better, as the emulation system allows you to load the old graphics API without the need to download anything, try it for yourself!