Question: winSPMBT in Windows8

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by Rosmarus

I've been running Win8 for a few weeks now and I'm quite happy with it. Of course there are some issues with it but it's still fresh and there are bound to be some bugs. You can skip metro interface very quickly and apart from seeing it when you boot up you don't have to use it at all. As for the SPMBT, the game works like a charm. Even without the fix file. Reason for that is that Win8 ditched Aero interface which was causing all the problems. I can even run SPWAW without any problems straight from the box on Win8. Actually this OS seems to be more backwards compatible than Windows 7 (I have no experience with Vista).

Now that I'm at it, I ordered MBT mostly because of the higher resolutions it offers, but I was wondering whether it supports any resolutions meant for 16:9 displays, 1080p for example.

Desktop resolution does whatever display your desktop is currently set to - I am using a 1080p display on XP ATM. So 1920 by 1080 wide-screen.

Looks like I may advance to Windows 8, after the release of the first service pack of course!. Reports do say the actual windows is a real advance, once you get past the kiddy's front end blocks interface of "metro".

Once I have the real beast to hand then I can fix the launcher to detect it and avoid the script for full-screen running that Windows vista/seven required due to nasty Aero not playing nicely with the 256 colour palette in full screen (not just a problem with this game, but all old-style 256 colour mode games of the DOS era, it appears)

cheers
Andy

[Rosmarus]

Thank you for your quick responses!

[152H55]

I joined the Win8 crew and waiting it to show its real potential as I'm currently having some stability issues which can be hardware related. Anyway, WinSPMBT seems to work great under Win8. I'm running the DL version full screen which I couldn't do on my Vista machine, even after all the tricks and fixes.

However, can I disable (by modifying Win7SPMBT.cmd?) the command that kills the desktop when fullscreen as it is unnecessary feature for Win8. I played 1.0 version while downloading the patch and it worked perfectly.

[Rosollia]

Just start the game directly from "WinSPMBT.exe" in your game directory and you will bypass the fix.

Ofcourse you could modify Win7SPMBT.cmd too by opening it with notepad and deleting all the text there and replacing it with just "winspmbt.exe".

[Rosmarus]

Heya, I just got SPMBT CD-version and installed it to my new win8 laptop. The problem is that game seems to run in "bits". What i'm trying to say is that when I move my mouse to the edge of the map it scrolls, then stops for a moment and then scrolls some more and stops again. Same goes for the units, tank moves a bit, stops and then moves a bit again, you get the idea. I'd propably blame this on my specs if I didn't know any better. I ran MBT nicely on my previous laptop which was an ASUS EeePC, very very weak considering the hardware. It can't be Win8 either since my tabletop runs it smoothly and it has Win8 as well. Any ideas what to click to make this go away? Oh, I can't change GDI mode to the DIrectX, it's all grayed out.

Specs for those who are interested:
Intel Core i5 3210M 2,5GHz (2 cores)
Nvidia 635M
4gb DDR3
Win 8 64bit

[Rosollia]

Originally Posted by Mobhack

Once I have the real beast to hand then I can fix the launcher to detect it and avoid the script for full-screen running that Windows vista/seven required due to nasty Aero not playing nicely with the 256 colour palette in full screen (not just a problem with this game, but all old-style 256 colour mode games of the DOS era, it appears)

Does the launcher check the OS version number to determine if it should run the cmd fix?
If so the version number for Windows 8 appears to be "6.2".

e.g.
Registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion"
"CurrentVersion" string:
Windows XP = 5.1
Windows Vista = 6.0
Windows 7 = 6.1
Windows 8 = 6.2

Also I found that you could do the version check using the command promt too with information posted at this web site:
http://www.grimadmin.com/article.php...ect-os-version

So one could edit the Win7SPMBT.cmd to look like this:

@echo off

FOR /F "delims=: tokens=2" %%i IN ('systeminfo 2^>NUL ^| find "OS Name"') DO set vers=%%i

echo %vers% | find "Windows 8" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto ver_8
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 1 goto ver_vista_7

:ver_8
:Run Windows 8 specific commands here.
WinSPMBT.exe
goto exit

:ver_vista_7
taskkill.exe /f /im explorer.exe
start /w WinSPMBT.exe
start %WINDIR%\explorer.exe

:exit

Provided I got it right that should do an additional check to see if the OS is Windows 8 and skip the fix in that case.

[Rosollia]

Originally Posted by Rosmarus

Heya, I just got SPMBT CD-version and installed it to my new win8 laptop. The problem is that game seems to run in "bits". What i'm trying to say is that when I move my mouse to the edge of the map it scrolls, then stops for a moment and then scrolls some more and stops again. Same goes for the units, tank moves a bit, stops and then moves a bit again, you get the idea. I'd propably blame this on my specs if I didn't know any better. I ran MBT nicely on my previous laptop which was an ASUS EeePC, very very weak considering the hardware. It can't be Win8 either since my tabletop runs it smoothly and it has Win8 as well. Any ideas what to click to make this go away? Oh, I can't change GDI mode to the DIrectX, it's all grayed out.

Specs for those who are interested:
Intel Core i5 3210M 2,5GHz (2 cores)
Nvidia 635M
4gb DDR3
Win 8 64bit

If the game runs fine on your desktop pc with win8 but is jerky on your laptop then my guess is that there is some sort of driver or software issue on that laptop.

Did you try running the game in both fullscreen and windowed modes? Was there any difference?

EDIT
Quite far fetched probably but you could also try to run the game on the second core of your multicore prosessor.
In this case you would use the command:
start /B /WAIT /AFFINITY 2 WinSPMBT.exe
to start the game from the command promt or with a cmd file in the game dir. Not sure if that works on win8 though...

[Rosmarus]

In windowed mode the game seems to run fine. Any ideas why I can't switch between GDI and DirectX?

[Rosollia]

Originally Posted by Rosmarus

In windowed mode the game seems to run fine. Any ideas why I can't switch between GDI and DirectX?

DirectX option is disabled on windows vista and later.
From the game manual:
"Game Mode-Sets up the game to start in as a Window or Full screen and to use Direct X or GDI. GDI may be useful in some windows emulators e.g. on Linux. Normally DirectX is recommended but testing has revealed that GDI works better when the game is run in Windowed mode with MS Vista or Windows 7 because If directx mode is chosen the Windows Aero system will still scramble the palette when you alt-tab to another programme and the game is minimised to the task bar. On restoring the game later the palette will be scrambled. However, with GDI mode, this problem does not occur, and so the GameOptions launcher now selects GDI mode for windowed game play and DirectX mode is disabled for Windowed mode when gameoptions finds Vista or Win7 on start up"

In the game mode it just has GDI grayed out in full screen and windowed mode in my windows 7 machines.

[Rosmarus]

Okay, thanks for the quick reply. Another issue. I can't see artillery blast radius, when I turn blast radius display on nothing happens. Is there something I'm missing? Same thing happens on my tabletop as well.
E: after referring to the manual it seems that blast radius is only visible when shells have already landed. Am I correct? Previouly I thought it'd give an estimate of area that that would be inside the blast zone if hex of my choosing would be bombarded.