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Crimson Skies

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Revision as of 19:33, 22 July 2013 by 99.5.124.151 (talk)
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Reddit User /u/WinterCharm and his unnamed friend created a fix to allow this game to work on Windows 7 with ATI and Nvidia hardware. The reddit post is transcribed below:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1inr2w/does_anyone_here_remember_crimson_skies_i_just/

>Does anyone remember the arcade type flight game crimson skies? It had an awesome campaign, and airplanes and zepplins, and of course, epic dogfights and great voice acting.

I finally got it working on Windows 7, and if anyone wants, I can help you out to get it working again.

It's an oldie (uses direct x 6) but it's a damn good game.

    • Edit:**

It's really late right now, but I promise you guys ill have the fix posted tomorrow morning.

What you need to do is:

1. Install the game 2. Patch to the 1.02 patch

When I post the fix all you have to do us copy the .exe and the two ini files into the install directory.

I'll be putting them up so you guys can download them in just a bit, or, first thing tomorrow.

Sorry for the delays, everyone. I was really busy, and wasn't sure if there would be enough interest.

    • Edit 2:** Here's the fix!

https://copy.com/cRHniT0S8Pt7 (1.1 MB)

Download and extract it - There's a concise readme inside. :)

    • Edit 3:** Sorry about the hosting issues. I've hosted it on MEGA as requested.

https://mega.co.nz/#!5UkiTJYJ!LzrHOg71mnXjWUsv6YYz3gs9uNdHQeb6iVOG1MZma_c (1.1 MB)

Let me know if you guys have any more problems.


When asked about what he did to fix the game, WinterCharm replied in a comment:

>A friend and I sat down and actually had to modify the .exe and change the way z-buffering was handled. Essentially, the issues arose from the game's z-buffers being written in an odd way that was no longer compatible with updated graphics drivers. Modern graphics card drivers contain z-buffer optimization that makes the assumption that 1.0 is the back of the buffer and 0.0 is the front, which is true for most games, but not Crimson Skies. Extra buffer Cleans had to be added to fix this. At the same time, part of the game was written in a way that assumed processors would never become faster than "x" where, if the game detected a processor faster than "x" it would actually give you an "error divide by zero" and crash, refusing to start up. At the same time Nvidia and ATI both removed Dithering support on their DX 10 drivers, and while this makes no difference to 32 bit render targets (which most every game uses) it does affect games that use 16 bit render targets, namely, Crimson Skies, BattleZone, etc. Now, to fix most of these issues, we implemented artificial caps for things like the processor speed, and limiting the game to only 1 thread. We also forced it to use 32 bit render targets.