"Bypass" hardware detection (to get S/W to start)

Hi All,

I bought Prince of Persia, Warrior Within going on 2 years ago now, and Two Thrones just over 1 year ago. At the time they ran great.

Now, however, I'm finding the games won't boot now even though they pass all hardware tests. The problem, it seems, is that they don't recognise the new graphics card/processor.

So, I'm looking for a way to either:

A) Just get these games working or

B) Trace what functions in what DLL's they call, and "emulate" my old graphics/processor in the same way 3DAnalyzer cheats the graphics system (create DLLs with the same name containing the same function, with one modified...)

Do any of you have any pointers here? I'm in no rush, but these are games I quite enjoy playing on occasion...

It's a shame. I've been losing faith in Ubisoft for quite some time, then when they ditched Starforce, I was happy, but it seems, the developers of these games can't code a proper init....

Uninstall it, delete any crap its left behind, reinstall?

Tried that. :(

Of course, a windows installation that lasts that long is a miracle ;)

You could try a virtualized environment like VMWare or Virtual PC... Possibly run an older Os inside of it (like win98). Especially if a game is a couple of years old, the small performance hit induced by virtualizing tends to be offset by having a faster computer than common when the game was first released.

good idea, but the games are full hardware accelerated 3D. :) virtualisation software don't cut it. :( Thanks for the idea though.

VMWare Workstation 5.0+ might suprise you in that regard.

Fraid not. I've been keeping en eye out on VMware and virtual PC for a long while.

These games are still pretty high end even for today- They are only 2 years old and require DX9c to run.

Bit of a shame if you ask me, since the PoP series was one of the few franchises which Ubisoft didn't completely bork with regards to bugs in terms of their PC releases....
(seriously, near all of their recent PC releases are broken or run hideously without patching)

Albeit my bro seems to have an issue with the original PoP playing in fast-forward on his PC and jerking sporadically.......

No idea on how to bypass that initialization procedure besides contacting Ubisoft support (>.>) to get the usual nothingness, shame too since they're great games.


Didn't know Two Thrones got a PC release, should be in the bargain bin now....pick me up a copy, recently got Warrior Within for $5 and blasted through it, and it still looked great by todays standard.

Genexi2, yes, Sands of Time seems to fast forward on modern machines- you need to somehow limit it to 30fps as i don't think the engine was designed for full-on 60fps.

Warrior Within had bugs- he wouldn't always run up the wall, and would sometimes just hit it and stop. The PC version also wouldn't allow you to throw weapons whilst balancing on a beam, whereas my Gamecube version does.

Sands of Time is aging, but even that requires pixel shader 1.1 (Or the water just shows as grey- but it still runs ;) )

Warrior Within and Two Thrones both look great, but Warrior Within is (strangely) my favourite, despite it lacking the same voice as the first and third game, and It also lacks the sarcasm which made them funny.

Ubisoft won't reply.

OK, Lets tackle this from another point of view:

How can I trace any API calls the game booter calls?

You can use dependency walker to see what api calls it's making.

If it's your graphics card that it's complaining about, then it's probably using IDirect3D9::GetAdapterIdentifier. Build yourself a fake d3d9 dll and override that function to return the details of an older card. You can download the source of one of these and strip out the oblivion specific stuff to save having to create a wrapper from scratch.

The thing is, it's not complaining about anything at all, everything gets ticked, but the "Launch game" button doesn't hilight.

I don't know what it is thats actually causing this, looks like a bug in the launcher, but if I can "fake" my old system then woot. And I don't doubt this will help others, too.

Is there a option for using software rendering? Procs these days should be powerful enough if the games are old.

If the games have an OpenGL option then try to set that and use the softwareGL emulation driver on the nVidia site. I think that MS also have a similar thing on their site.

Software rendering won't be an option for these games. I tried a few. the 7600GS card I have is only a little bit above the games reccomended spec.