Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hello,

I made a small widescreen fix for Dawn of War GOTY. This will work for the current Dawn of War - GOTY Steam version, but should work for any games of the series (ie Dark Crusader, Winter Assault ...) althrough I never tested on other versions.




How-to:

1) Go into your W40k:GotY installation folder, locate the file "Local.ini" and edit the "screenheight" and "screenwidth" parameters to the desired resolution. For example, if you want a 1920x1080 resolution, you should have the following lines:

screenheight=1080
screenwidth=1920

2) You'll need to modify your W40k.exe and UserInterface.dll files in order to have a correct aspect ratio. I'll provide two solutions:

- Use the following patchers for the aspect ratio of your choice. Since I used diablo2oo2 patching engine to create them, I guess some antivirus will go crazy about them.

(LINK REMOVED, WILL REMAKE THE PATCHERS LATER)

- If you don't trust me (I can't really blame you), you'll have to manually hex-edit your files.

First, open W40k.exe and search for the following hex value: "ABAAAA3F". Replace it with 398EE33F if you have a 16/9 monitor or CCCCCD3F if you have a 16/10 monitor. Save your file.

Now open Platform.dll and search for the following hex value: "ABAAAA3F". Replace it with 398EE33F if you have a 16/9 monitor or CCCCCD3F if you have a 16/10 monitor. Save your file.

Now open spDx9.dll and search for the following hex value: "ABAAAA3F". Replace it with 398EE33F if you have a 16/9 monitor or CCCCCD3F if you have a 16/10 monitor. Save your file.

Now open UserInterface.dll file and search for the same hex value "ABAAAA3F". You should find 2 occurrences of this value. Replace both occurrences with 398EE33F if you have a 16/9 monitor or CCCCCD3F if you have a 16/10 monitor. Save your file and close your hex editor.

Now the game should run in the desired resolution without black bars.

Using your fix appears to be working as intended (game boots in 1080p, aspect ratio seems correct minus the HUD) but when selecting icons on the bottom right side the camera begins to pan. Moving the mouse to the right side of the screen at all, in fact, causes the camera to pan.

It seems as if it's still using the same 4:3 box for camera panning as the issue only occurs on the sides, panning up/down only happens on the actual edge of the screen whereas left/right panning occurs before the mouse reaches the edge of the screen, making it impossible to select the 2 rightmost rows of icons. Have you encountered this as well or am i doing something wrong? Been looking around for a few hours trying to come up with a fix..

Hello,

Yes I didn't notice that. Here's a fix:

Open Platform.dll and search for the following hex value: "ABAAAA3F". Replace it with 398EE33F if you have a 16/9 monitor or CCCCCD3F if you have a 16/10 monitor. Save your file.

Now open spDx9.dll and search for the following hex value: "ABAAAA3F". Replace it with 398EE33F if you have a 16/9 monitor or CCCCCD3F if you have a 16/10 monitor. Save your file.

This fixes the camera problem. For the last step, I'm not too sure, it seems only the first step is needed to fix it, but I think replacing all the references to the 4/3 ratio is a better idea than to patch only a part of the game.

Well, i have no idea how to manually hex-edit my files and used your installers but i'm sure with a little googling I'll be able to figure it out. However, thanks to steam sales, i bought the dawn of war franchise pack and i believe that the dawn of war 1 expansions include widescreen support by default.

So i think I'll do your fix first just to see how it works/behaves, then do a fresh install with the expansions and see how they handle my 16:9 resolution (from what i remember reading some people weren't happy with relic's implementation) and depending on which works better I'll try using this fix again with the expansions installed. I'll post back with my results later but since it's holidays and all that might not be too soon.

Works perfectly after manual hex edit! Thanks!

Any way to fix the mini map? Mine is x4 and half of it off screen

Does this work with the box releases? i got that platinum back that contained all the versions before steam and then when THQ had a massive sale on steam on a couple of years back i got spare versions for steam. will i need the steam versions? or can i just use my old box keys?

EDIT: i also have encountered a small problem, yesterday it worked, it took up the entire screen, buttons were click-able i didnt notice any problems, today i reopened it and the black bars have decided to come up again, im not sure if this is because i may have gone into the options menu or something but yeah, might want to add once done dont accept anything in options because it might reset resolution (i am using steam GOTY edition at the moment)

2nd EDIT: Ok good news and bad news
good news, is the resolution does happen to reset, all you have to do is go to local ini and set the resolution again, dont have to do any hex editing
bad news im not sure if its going into option menu just yet cos the last time i went in most of the options disappeared
More bad news, the minimap is not fixed with this, its definitely noticeable in mission 3

Hi I'm new here and this will probably be my only post on this forum, but I thought it would be handy to share this information.

So, I fancied a bit of nostalgia and had the urge to start playing DoW and I came across this thread for the widescreen hex edit, so thanks to Shuny for the original information.

Unfortunately, I experienced the problem with the minimap being "out of sync" (for lack of a better description).

Good news for those having problems with the minimap. There is a fix/workaround!

The problem with the minimap is tied into the resolution of the game. I am playing on a laptop which will only support a maximum resolution of 1366x768. This resolution is one the offending resolutions for the minimap. So, what I did was edit the local.ini file, and changed the resolution to 1360x760.

So, in short... if you are playing on a resolution of 1366x768, change down to 1360x768!

For people playing on other 16:9 resolutions suffering from the minimap bug, I would recommend having a fiddle with the the resolution in the local.ini file until you have cracked it.

I hope this helps!

I have done the local.ini edit, made it read only, done the hex-editing of the exe, dll, etc.

But ingame options NEVER shows me a 1920x1080 option.

Any suggestions?