Hi, I'm a newcomer in the forum but a long time user of the site (thanks to all involved
). In the process of reliving one of my first PC titles (WCP) again, I wanted to include all the patches to bring the game to the modern age. This includes the HD movie pack (thanks ODVS). After I had some of the mentioned problems myself, I wanted to give my solution for different problems.
First my install order
- Install Game
- Copy all files from the "Wing Commander Prophecy - Enhancement Pack" (wcpep_release.zip) to the game folder
- DELETE wcphr.dll ... For me step 4 somehow did not overwrite the file, but we want a new one
- Install the "Wing Commander Prophecy and Secret-ops Model Update Pack" (OpenGL-WCP_setup(TEST-MUP)-RELEASE-CANDIDATE.exe)
For me I had the least problems with the wcphr.dll from the MUP.
Problems:
Top left quarter of video fills the entire screen
Probably a HighDPI display is used together with the DPI scaling function of Windows 10. This also scales the Video. To circumvent this, alter the "High DPI settings" in the compatibility tab of the prophecy.exe. Overwrite the setting to use application based settings.
Audio plays, but black screen when video should be playing
Since the audio plays, you know the direct show splitter is working. The video not playing can be due to the renderer or the codec. On my AMD APU the video is black when I do NOT use anti aliasing (FSAA) in the OpenGL settings. On my NVIDIA GeForce, this makes no difference. If the problem is not solved by activating FSAA, you should consider the codec and install the K-Lite codec pack.
Video appears squished in top left quarter of screen
This can be a scaling problem (play with the FSAA setting). For me it was a wrong wcphr.dll.
Black screen and no audio when video should be playing
- This can be a splitter/codec problem -> install K-Lite codec pack
For videos from ODVS (MP4 extension) at least the sound should play, since he used H264 for video and AAC for audio. Both codecs should be present in Windows 10 (you can test this with the Windows Media Player). This leaves splitter and/or render problems. The old DVD videos (VOB extension) use MPEG2 for video and AC3 for audio. Here you probably need codecs.
- If the problem does not go away, this can also be a problem of your installation (wrong wcphr.dll).
If your videos look like the above picture, they play with the wrong picture output levels after color conversion. PC monitors use a range of 0 to 255 for the allowed luminance of each channel, whereas TVs use a range of 16-235. If your renderer produces a converted output for the TV range, but you use a monitor output (which you probably will), deep black will be displayed as dark gray and your highlights will not be as bright as they could. The other way around, you would clip highlights and dark areas will go under in a see of black.
For me the AMD APU out of the box produced the right picture (below). The NVIDIA card produced the wrong. Since I was lazy, I did not change settings for the direct show filter or renderer, but changed the settings in the NVIDIA control panel:
Video -> Adjust Video Color Settings
- choose your main monitor under 1. if you have more then one
- go to "2. How do you make color adjustments?"
- set to "with the NVIDIA settings"
- Switch to "Advanced" tab
- Change the dynamic range to 0-255
I hope this helps some folks with WCP problems
.
). This means I will probably post more problems/solutions in the future, if I do not find something in older threads.
