How to get an old Windows binary (Jump 'n Bump; win32) to work on modern Windows?

Question

I understand that this question is grasping at straws, but here goes:

I was downloading various games for my Fedora laptop to keep my son from dying of boredom during a train ride - one of the things that I found was a proper blast from the past - namely the classic Jump 'n Bump.

To my surprise it struck a chord with him and now he has requested I fit his Windows laptop with the same game.

I figured it shouldn't be to hard as I remember playing it on Windows. What I failed to account for however is that Windows might have evolved a tad during the 20-30 years that have passed since then.

To the uninitiated there is some history on Wikipedia about Jump 'n Bump.

Brainchild Design no longer exists — but the code was released into the open — and there is still a Windows binary available for download over at icculus.org.

The binary is perfectly runnable — even though it was released in 2004 — but at a 1920x1080 screen resolution the game at 400x256 looks a bit like a stamp on the back of an envelope.

The Linux binary can be fed the command line arguments -scaleup and -fullscreen and everything is fine.

Trying the same thing in Windows has no effect — even though the docs clearly state that it should.

Note that only the command without the args actually open the window; the others just silently die.

While the command echo nothing to cmd it does write stdout/stderr.txt to the file system:

C:\spel\jumpnbump-1.51-win32>jumpnbump.exe -h
C:\spel\jumpnbump-1.51-win32>type stdout.txt
Usage: jumpnbump [OPTION]...
-h                       this help
  -v                       print version
  -dat level.dat           play a different level
  -server playercount      start as server waiting for players
  -connect host            connect to server
  -player num              set main player to num (0-3). Needed for networking
  -fireworks               screensaver mode
  -fullscreen              run in fullscreen mode
  -nosound                 play without sound
  -nogore                  play without blood
  -noflies                 disable flies
  -mirror                  play with mirrored level
  -scaleup                 play with doubled resolution (800x512)
  -musicnosound            play with music but without sound
C:\spel\jumpnbump-1.51-win32>jumpnbump.exe -scaleup
C:\spel\jumpnbump-1.51-win32>type stderr.txt
C:\spel\jumpnbump-1.51-win32>jumpnbump.exe -fullscreen
C:\spel\jumpnbump-1.51-win32>type stderr.txt
SDL ERROR: DirectDrawSurface::Release: Unknown DirectDraw error: 0x1

Now, after that long ingress, I wonder if there is some way I can force feed that binary the command line arguments?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 11 '24 at 17:37

I was able to cobble something similar to working together.

I searched the web for the DirectDraw error and found references to dgVoodoo2 - which is some sort of shim to allow older code calls to be translated into something working on modern Windows.

By putting the 32bit DirectX dll's from dgVoodoo2 in the same folder as the game binary the -fullscreen option started working.

The binary no longer works without it, but I can live with that.

dgVoodoo2 defaults to watermarking the picture - but it can be disabled by tweaking C:\Users\matti\AppData\Roaming\dgVoodoo\dgVoodoo.conf - which there is a gui for.

The option is:

[DirectX]
dgVoodooWatermark                   = false

As once noted in the comments, there is a better working version. I'll stick with it instead of the workaround above.

How to get an old Windows binary (Jump 'n Bump; win32) to work on modern Windows?

1 Answers1