Running SPWAW with SlowCpuEmulator (yet another artillery screen fix)

[Riitaoja2]

UPDATE:
The SP:WaW Depot now has an unofficial patch (8.403d) available that corrects the artillery screen unresponsive mouse.
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/spwawdepot/index.php
It should supersede all these old fixes.

P.S.
Dxwnd is still very useful for running SPWAW. It can be used to fix the colors on Win7 (and Vista) and the “Handle exceptions” option reduces random crashing.

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Original post:

UPDATE:
The developer of Dxwnd has added a new "Use precise timing" option starting with Dxwnd version 2.04.45. This new option appears to give a similar performance as the Slow Cpu Emulator in SPWAW.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dxwnd/

link:
https://slowcpu.codeplex.com/

In my testing this program seems to solve the artillery screen issues with SPWAW better than Dxwnd or BES.

When using Dxwnd to slow down SPWAW one has to be careful not to slow down the game too much since then the audio starts to suffer. However using the "Slow CPU" Emulator program I do not hear any audio distortion no matter how much I slow down the game (the emulation seems smoother too). This leaves more room to find a good slow down value for the game. In addition SlowCpuEmulator allows the speed to be adjusted in game by use of the following keys:
Increase speed by 3%: Shift+F9
Decrease speed by 3%: Shift+F8
This makes it easy to adjust the speed until the artillery screen works without the need to close the game to make adjustments.

How to use "Slow CPU" Emulator emulator:

First slowcpuemulator.exe is placed in the main SPWAW folder where mech.exe resides.

I have been running the "Slow CPU" Emulator from a batch file (.bat or .cmd) that looks like this:
slowcpuemulator.exe mech.exe 22 35

The two number values at the end define the interval in milliseconds "22" and the slowdown in percentage "35". Of course depending on the CPU a different slowdown percentage might need to be used. The lower the number the slower the game should run. I have not bothered adjusting the milliseconds value from the default 22.


How to run SlowCpuEmulator together with Dxwnd:

If you want to use it together with Dxwnd you can simply add the following text in the launch field of Dxwnd configuration for SPWAW:
Launch: C:\Steel Panthers world at War\slowcpuemulator.exe mech.exe 22 35

Of course you also need to make sure that Dxwnd's own "CPU slow down" feature is disabled. Otherwise the two programs will conflict with each other and produce poor results.

Edit: Also Dxwnd needs to be run as Administrator or slowcpuemulator will not work with it.

Alternatively you could run SlowCpuEmulator together with DDrawCompat:
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases
(version DDrawCompat v0.2.1 should work)

In this case you simply place ddraw.dll and slowcpuemulator.exe in the main game folder and start the game using a batch file or the command prompt with the command: slowcpuemulator.exe mech.exe 22 35