Eternal Daughter Notes

(Posted in my thread on SA while I was doing the LP)

Sure, I was going to put something together at some point but I guess now's as good at time as any. I'm afraid all it does is make windowed mode run in an actual window (and you still need to use -NOF); it's still in 320x240, but at least you can move it around to one side of your screen and try and magnify it on the other. I actually ended up using virtualdub's capture preview to play the game, which seems to only work nicely if you have Aero disabled. It certainly beats 'renders in one corner of 640x480 or makes your screen black and renders in the middle' though.

Since it's only like 9 meg, here's the whole, patched, binary: (link is dead)
Alternatively, use a hex editor to change B4 8E at 79C75 and 6 to B0 86 (just past the second instance of "PAME" in the binary) - disables the blackness and gives it a border/title bar respectively.

(Note: What I originally wrote is kinda wrong? B4 -> B2 enables the border/title, 8E -> 86 fixes it being maximised. Setting it to B0 doesn't seem to actually be detrimental)

I'd also seriously recommend updating from the Cncs232.dll that is in the archive with the one found on this page http://gamerdude.thisisourcorner.net/resources/dll/ or similar (that one is apparently 2.5.119.0, vs 2.0.0.87 that ED comes with). It seems to perhaps maybe prevent a bug which causes the game to freeze unless a sound is playing, and also seems to remove the pause when repeating an already playing midi at the expense of missing some notes (it still pauses when switching to a new one and back - the only fix for that is apparently using windows 98). Otherwise I don't think there's any downsides.

Finally, there's an issue with vista and windows 7 where it always uses the Microsoft midi device rather than eg my sound card's nice midi device with nice sounding sound fonts in (an artefact of MMF + changes in the way midi devices are arranged in windows vista). I ended up playing it using a windows XP vm with some software midi devices which passed the midi data around, eventually though some nice sound fonts. That kind of worked ok, but is a whole other can of worms, and we've seen what that can do to you (Poor Throm).

It's almost as hard to get to a playable state as it is to play it to begin with, so, I hope some of this helps I guess.

edit - also I eventually managed to find the font the game uses buried on one of my many computers. I think it may have been an old office font? The file name was ArialNB.ttf if you have old computers to trawl, then again, maybe you already have it. It's not as big of a deal though, all that happens if you don't have it is that sometimes the text runs outside of the chat box.

double edit - oh yeah if you use vista/7 and you have UAC on, pretty much any UAC event will make the game crash. And, I use Glovepie for my joypad->keyboard mapping, because the ingame text and some of the save/load dialogues don't respect joypad input, and because I can do some cool stuff with it which I can't fnangle joy2key into doing.