[Katsunami]

Rant @ DirectX / Graphics.

I want to finish the Baldur's Gate 1 playthrough I put on hold over a year ago, so I installed it on my laptop. It's an old game, and it needs some fixes on newer computers. Many fixes for many problems have been devised by the community (some by myself, actually).

In Windows 10, ran perfectly without ANY fixes, at least on my old desktop. On the laptop, it runs, but it has all the usual problems this game has on newer graphics cards. No more running without fixes. While many of the fixes worked, they introduced new problems; something they didn't on the desktop computer that ran Windows 10, and 7 before it.

After searching and testing for some time, it seems that there is only *one* glitch on Windows 10, at least right now: some of the tiles in the landscape are displayed the wrong way around. There is a fix for that, programmed by one of the guys who made one of the earlier graphics fixes.

After some jacking around with the config, it works, but it's yet another fix to add to the inventory... and it's not sure how long it will work, as drivers and Windows 10 are continually changing, something which was not the case in Windows 8.x and before.

Now I have Baldur's Gate 1 setup on my laptop, with its savegame folder in Dropbox. If I can get it to run on the desktop, I can finally finish it once more, and then shelve it.

The one thing I find perplexing is that it actually looks quite good in 640x480, on the laptop's 1920x1080 screen. No, this is not The Witcher 3, and it lost a bit of sharpness, but the game is playable without any of the resolution mods. (Those make everything sharper by increasing the resolution, but everything gets a lot smaller as well.)

The up-scaling algorithms in current displays seem to have become very, very good. I wonder how it's going to look on the desktop, which has 1920x1200. I have to have it on the same resolution on both systems, because the savegames depend on that.