windows 10 issue

[Mobhack]

Yes - full-screen 256 colour mode is now an obsolete MSDOS format, which graphics card drivers now rarely support in any meaningful way. Perhaps those companies now give that one to the student intern to write, since there is no longer any need for it to be the red hot video mode of yore, just simply "supported". It is no longer faster than full-colour windows modes as it was a decade or more in the past.

With today's graphics cards centred on DirectX full colour modes, and shifting polygons in 3D modes and so on, its nowadays faster to convert each pixel of the 256 colour palette screen into a high colour palette and then render that surface. Modern video cards may use some of the 3D graphics engine to do this - perhaps with pixel shaders.

So ye olde 256 colour mode is therefore in the same place as the Dodo and the dinosaur - defunct. full screen mode is just a quaint relic of when we had to support the old MSDOS mode back in the windows 95 (and maybe XP) days, when it was faster.

If you have the full game, then you should be playing in windowed mode using the desktop resolution. It will then utilise the current monitor settings, and occupy the full desktop less the area for the task bar at the bottom of the screen. The game runs faster in this mode nowadays as stated above - and you can task switch out to other windows applications with no palette distortion problems when switching back to the game, unlike in full screen mode.

[tlscales]

Tried running winSPWW2 on Win 10 (just upgraded from Win 7).

In Full screen with either DirectX or GDI, Desktop as the screen size, I get the game to load, but it plays slow and jerky (a lot worse than Windows 7). Behavior with other resolutions is the same, but with ugly aspect ratios

In Windowed mode with either DirectX or GDI, also using Desktop as the screen size, the game displays a strip about 1/3 the height of the screen, and none of the buttons work, so I have no idea how it plays (and the scenario selection is pretty much unreadable due to the weird aspect ratio). Only way to close the app in Windowed mode is using the task manager. Behavior with other resolutions is the same, but the strip is a little wider or thinner.

This is not the kind of performance improvement I was hoping for.

Are there any other settings/tweaks that might get the game working better?