Pharaoh, Zeus...on widescreen

Something to do? :roll:

Continuing from the IRC...

If we don't have the games, we can't be of help. Sorry.

Ok.

However, those games are similar to Caesar III, this is more famous. I think that someone could have it.

byez

I do believe those are DX7 correct? They are pretty old.

They came out in 1999-2000. DirectX 6.1 would be more likely. They were strictly 2D games, so calling them "DirectX 6" games wouldn't mean the same thing as calling Half-Life a "DirectX 6" game.

In any event, the year of their release is a better indicator of how old they are than which version of DirectX they used.

I used to have both of these games, but I know I don't have Zeus any more, and I doubt I have Pharaoh any more. I doubt a widescreen solution is likely. If you want to try to find one yourself, you could start by locating the file the resolution is stored in. Try this:

Set the game to the lowest resolution. Save settings, and quit.
Copy the game directory to another drive (or another directory).
Launch the game, and set it to the highest resolution. Save settings, and quit.
Move the copy of the game directory back to the original location.
Launch the game.

If the resolution is at the highest setting, then it isn't stored in a file in the game directory. Look somewhere else. It's most likely either in another directory, or in the registry. But if the resolution is at the lowest, then it's stored in a file in the game directory. Repeat the above five steps, but on the fourth step, move *some* of the files back, not all. Keep doing this until you isolate the settings to the right bunch of files, then repeat the steps again until you find the one file that holds it.

"Deleted"

Hi ! I also have the same problem with these games and I tried cranky hermint's method and found the file ! although there's a problem I can't understand the language it is written in, the file is .INF extension. and it has the following content :

.


 d d Osorkon 
  2

d P d d   B  

that's it ! don't know whitch letters shoud I change to set a different resolution ! If someone knows this stuff pls answer ! many thX :?

Sorry for necroposting but..just had to bump this one. Anyone found any solutions to this yet? This game is simply one of the best city building games based on greek mythology out there. The building graphics in this game especially sanctuaries/temples look so realistic and beautiful that they make even the best looking ones from other 2D RTS like Age of Empires 2 look like shacks and unlike AOE2 this game doesn't suffer from palette corruption in Windows 7 with aero enabled and in terms of gameplay, well its the pinnacle of Sierra's city building series. C'mon guys, doesn't anyone play this game anymore to find a widescreen fix? This game definitely deserves one.

I made very small progress: If you analyse Zeus.inf (which is the .inf mentioned above) in a Hex editor, you can see that at 0x10 is a value telling the game which of the resolutions was used last time, i.e. your settings. 02 for 800x600, 03 for 1024x768. (I'm guessing it will be 01 for window mode). This shows that the .inf is actually not useful in customizing a resolution. The actual resolution values are stored somewhere else, maybe in Zeus.exe itself.

EDIT: I made somewhat of a progress... I managed to change the fullscreen resolution from 800x600 to 1280x720 by editing Zeus.exe, but the game itself won't scale accordingly. It looks totally messed up:

(German version, incl. Poseidon add-on in case you are wondering)

If it is helpful for anyone: I searched for 58 02 and checked if there was a 20 03 nearby (800 and 600). Everytime I found something, I changed it to d0 02 and 00 05 for 1280 x 720, saved and started the game to see if anything had changed. The resolution could be changed at 0x17ccb1 and 0x17ccbb. (20 03 00 00 c7 05 e8 68 fc 00 58 02 00 00). Any suggestions what I could try?