ddfix - A patch for running Dark Engine games on modern hardware

With each new graphics driver release from nvidea and amd, more and more old games are breaking. The dark engine games (i.e. Thief 1, Thief 2 and System Shock 2) have long been a victim; Thief 2 first lost its stars, had issues with fogging and then lost all colour detail in shadows. On DX10 hardware from both nvida and amd, it appears to be rendered in 8 bit colour due to removed dithering support, and since the 169.xx driver revision it has become completely unplayable. nvidea or amd are utterly uninterested in spending manpower on fixing older games, so it's seems its fallen to me to get thief looking like its old self again. The current list of fixes include:

• Worked around broken dithering by forcing rendering to a 32 bit render target
• Fixed the issue with missing star textures
• Removed the resolution switching between the game and menus
• Fixed the texture corruption and crashes caused by nvidia forceware drivers newer than 169.xx
• Fixed the issue with multi core processors
• Fixed the issue with the video codec becoming unregistered
• Adds options to use a higher bit depth z-buffer or to disable the windows key

This patch is mainly designed to support Thief 2, and when used with the standard v1.18 exe some additional features are available.

• Fixes any issues with the driver incorrectly reporting free vram
• Adds a 32 bit texture loader, to allow the use of 32 bit textures instead of the usual 8 bit paletted images

Requires windows 2000 or above and a graphics card that supports 32 bit render targets. The GUI version also requires .NET 2.0 or a recent version of mono. Copy protected versions of the games may require downloading an unprotected version of the exe.

Download (v1.3.11) (Changelog)

GUI version
Manual version
Source code

Older versions

1.2.7 (Manual + source)
1.2.7 (GUI)
1.1.1 (Manual + source)