Working Windows 8 FPS fix

[ppp]

Hey

Recently I've tried playing this game on Win8 and couldn't as it ran like shit, so I tried to find a fix and found one. The fix is a bit complicated but it works great. Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to the Sapphire Yours install folder and find sapphire.exe. Right click on it, go to Properties, and Compatibility. Check "Run this program in compatibility", select "Windows XP (Service Pack 2)". Click OK.
2. Download a modified ddraw.dll from here:
www.play-old-pc-games.com/support-files/nolf-Windows_8_8_1_DDRAW_FPS_FIX.zip
If you want more info about what's modified find it here. Extract the DDRAW.dll from the zip file in to the installation folder of Sapphire Yours.
3. Run regedit.exe, and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers\
You should find a key whose name is the path to sapphire.exe and its value will be:

$ DWM8And16BitMitigation
Double click on that value and change it to:

$ DWM8And16BitMitigation 8And16BitTimedPriSync 8And16BitAggregateBlts Layer_ForceDirectDrawEmulation
4. Run Sapphire Yours and enjoy!

This works great on my Win 8.1 x64 system.

Additional fix you might be interested in is for the midi song change lag - every time a song changes there's a lag for a few seconds, this is caused by the MCI MIDI driver sleeping for 4 seconds every time a track is changed (more info about this here). So I've modified the MCI MIDI driver DLL to remove this sleep behavior, just download and place this DLL in to Sapphire Yours folder and there should be no more lag:
www.dropbox.com/s/9kbe7ztt4r7ggzu/mciseq.dll?dl=1

Enjoy!

[niltava]

Thanks a lot for coming up with a working solution! I haven't tried this out yet but good to hear that SY can be made playable on win8.

Also thanks for mentioning the MIDI delay setting. My 'solution' was to turn the music off but I didn't know there was a real solution for it.

[Alex]

Oct 1, 2015 15:38:34 GMT -5 ppp said:

Hey

Recently I've tried playing this game on Win8 and couldn't as it ran like shit, so I tried to find a fix and found one. The fix is a bit complicated but it works great. Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to the Sapphire Yours install folder and find sapphire.exe. Right click on it, go to Properties, and Compatibility. Check "Run this program in compatibility", select "Windows XP (Service Pack 2)". Click OK.
2. Download a modified ddraw.dll from here:
www.play-old-pc-games.com/support-files/nolf-Windows_8_8_1_DDRAW_FPS_FIX.zip
If you want more info about what's modified find it here. Extract the DDRAW.dll from the zip file in to the installation folder of Sapphire Yours.
3. Run regedit.exe, and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers\
You should find a key whose name is the path to sapphire.exe and its value will be:

$ DWM8And16BitMitigation
Double click on that value and change it to:

$ DWM8And16BitMitigation 8And16BitTimedPriSync 8And16BitAggregateBlts Layer_ForceDirectDrawEmulation
4. Run Sapphire Yours and enjoy!

This works great on my Win 8.1 x64 system.

Additional fix you might be interested in is for the midi song change lag - every time a song changes there's a lag for a few seconds, this is caused by the MCI MIDI driver sleeping for 4 seconds every time a track is changed (more info about this here). So I've modified the MCI MIDI driver DLL to remove this sleep behavior, just download and place this DLL in to Sapphire Yours folder and there should be no more lag:
www.dropbox.com/s/9kbe7ztt4r7ggzu/mciseq.dll?dl=1

Enjoy!

Thanks for figuring all this out and posting this! I can confirm that this fix works perfectly on Windows 10 as well.

[ppp]

Great to hear a confirmation that it works not only for me, even more so that it works on Win10 too.

[Randy]

When I try to open the .zip for ddraw.dll, I'm asked to insert the last disk of the multi-disk zip. Any idea where it is?

[Alex]

I noticed the download links for the DLL files don't seem to work anymore. Fortunately, I had them saved. Here's a ZIP file with both of them.

Attachments:

sapp_dll_files.zip (538.77 KB)