The Stack

My success in applying DxWnd to Robotron X inspired me to give it a try on one of the more recalcitrant games of its ilk, Galaga: Destination Earth. To my surprise, it simply worked immediately, without needing to set it up in DxWnd at all! This was not my experience six years ago. But that was before several Windows Updates and a couple of major hardware upgrades. Had my system simply grown out out of the problem? Maybe.

It wasn’t completely working correctly, though. The FMV intro didn’t play, and the background music, which was supposed to loop, would instead play just once and then stop. I can do without the FMV — I’ve seen the intro before, and the rest of the video clips in the game seem inessential, just some brief establishing shots at the start of each mission. It’s all viewable in VLC outside of the game, and I’ve done the same for other games before. Playing without the music, on the other hand, greatly detracts from the experience. It’s not that it’s amazing music, really. It’s a competent soundtrack for an extended action scene. But that’s something that the game really needs.

Now, I didn’t mention this in my writeup of Robotron X, but it had exactly the same problem with background music, and I solved it there. The cause: both games play their background music from the CD, and apparently Windows just dropped the ability to play CD-audio tracks on loop back in Windows Vista. DxWnd to the rescue! All I had to do is extract the tracks to Ogg Vorbis files and configure DxWnd to emulate CD playback with those. And so I wound up using DxWnd for Galaga after all.

Convincing DxWnd to actually run the game proved more difficult than it should have been. Apparently it has problems with filenames containing spaces, which strikes me as a pretty glaring oversight, considering that it requires you to give it the full path to the executable, and Windows likes to install stuff to a folder called “Program Files”. I had to copy the game to a new folder called “C:\GAMES\GALAGA” before it would hook into it at all.

This done, I managed to reach mission 6 out of 10 in one night. I’ll describe the game itself in my next post. I’d kind of like to see if I can get the FMV working before finishing the game, though, even though I consider it inessential. Based on the logs, it looks like it’s still trying to get the video data from the CD, even though I have the files installed locally. I can believe that this is a problem in itself — that the Windows media library is giving up on waiting for the CD drive to respond while it’s still trying to spin up, or something like that. And if that’s the problem, it seems like it should be solvable.