Hi friends, this is my first post. I have desperately searched the internet to find an active site for Wizards&Warriors. Then I encountered with Ironworks Forum. For a while, I only read the topics. But, now I want to write something.
As you can imagine I have a problem with W&W. I bought a new computer six months ago. It has an Nvidia Geforce GTS250 (old name => 9800GTX+) card on it. Unfortunately my system has a lot of problems with Direct3d mode of W&W. Apart from this annoying 'can't click on any object in the game world', there is also terrible flickering issue of the textures. I also have a notebook that has a Geforce 8600GS card on it. It does not have this flickering issue but I can't click on any object in direct3d mode. My old system can run W&W perfectly in 1024*768 (Athlon 2500+,1 gb ram, Geforce 6600GT, Win XP SP2). When I searched the forum, I discovered that it's an issue with the latest Nvidia cards and drivers. I think latest ATI cards can run the game in Direct3d without any problem. When I learned that I was disappointed because I had always thought Nvidia cards have the best compatibility but this is not the case with W&W. I had to give my old system unfortunately and bought a netbook instead. It has Win XP on it. I tried to run W&W direct3d on netbook. Graphics seems fine but when there is a monster on the screen FPS drops significantly and game becomes unplayable. So I stuck with software mode 640*480 W&W on my new system. I installed the game on Vista (I also have XP on the same machine - dual boot, but same problems under XP) apply VirtualDub, set the compatibility mode to Windows 98 and set the processor affinity to only one core. I can now play the game fine. Only problem is town screen scrolling is too fast. One click and screen scrolls too fast to the other side of the screen, entering the Armory building is really a pain sometimes.
Now my question: Is there a way to play the game (in software mode) to play in higher resolutions other than 640*480? I know there isn’t an option for this in the game options menu. I have searched the game files to find a config file which regulates the resolution. But, alas W&W do not use a traditinal ini file to change the values.
I hope someone someday will make a patch for W&W in order to play it on new systems. It a shame such a great RPG has been thrown into oblivion. Even RPGamers don't remember it anymore. There is an active community for Might&Magic and some guy constantly patching the series. But, no one cares about W&W except this site. I even think of learning some Direct3d programming to patch W&W.