Unfortunately, while DxWnd solves the color depth issue, running games at 640×480 on a 1920×1200 desktop is not really the best experience. It accomplishes this by hooking various DirectDraw APIs and tricking the program into thinking that it is running at 640×480 (or whatever resolution it wants) fullscreen, when it is in fact running in a plain window at that resolution.
DxWnd is a program that lets you run DirectDraw 7 (or below) programs that only support fullscreen mode in a window. So, I turned to a program I had written a couple of years ago – DxWnd. Unfortunately, I discovered that a lot of my old favorite classic games tended to do not-so-great things to your desktop color depth when you run them natively (in fullscreen mode), which while you might normally not care about, turns out to be a real bummer if you have something like an IM client or whatnot up on a second monitor. I recently got a nice 20.1″ LCD to use as a second monitor for my main laptop at home. This is a minor release that, among fixing a couple of various bugs and some internal code cleanup and reorganization to build under VC8, adds a new feature: Video output rescaling.
I’ve released a new version of DxWnd ( requires the VC8SP0 CRT) – version 1.034.
