How to get Dungeon Siege 1 to work correctly

[JezuzLizard]

Originally posted by ¦ö¦ ƒ ì г e ¦ö¦:

Hi, sorry for the necro, but I just wanted to pitch in and say that dgVoodoo worked for me after I couldn't figure out how to get the game to be in windowed mode and also larger resolution. Thanks guys. There is no need to follow the instructions as stated by the OP; just use dgVoodoo.

However, I experienced a lot of lag trying to run the game with only 256 MB of VRAM, so I chose dgVoodoo's Virtual 3D card instead and picked 1024 MB. Helped a lot. I did some other tweaks, as described below.

--------------------------------------------

Here are my dgVoodoo settings (1440p, 59 Hz):
https://i.gyazo.com/550e1a113fc0924d36ccf670e6d7d85b.png
https://i.gyazo.com/b5c81eef5f580fba7ac129c2ce894c96.png

Here are my DSLOA.exe command-line arguments (just in case; they also work for dungeonsiege.exe):
nointro=true fullscreen=false nospacecheck=true bltonly=true

Here are my scaling settings on Windows 10:
https://i.gyazo.com/f389d772a1ba0fb43a804001127464dc.png

--------------------------------------------

Troubleshooting - Freezing

I noticed that if I DON'T make DungeonSiege.ini read-only with custom resolution settings, the game can fail to load and just freeze. To fix this, I opened up the ini and wrote in the following settings:

driver_description = NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 - Hardware
width = 2432
height = 1368
bpp = 32

It looks like this (make sure DungeonSiege.ini is read-only after this):
https://gyazo.com/c4af187bd10d55587f9ba7cfea80906c

To find driver_description, just run DSVideoConfig.exe and copy it exactly from the list. DungeonSiege.ini is generally located in your Documents folder, under the appropriate game (Dungeon Siege or Dungeon Siege LOA).

Note: dgVoodoo must be configured to run the game at 59 Hz, or the game will freeze as well.

Troubleshooting - Unsupported Windowed Resolutions

On windowed mode, to avoid the pop-up error that shows on the screen when you try to run the game on an unsupported resolution, make sure to pick a resolution (in DungeonSiege.ini above) that is SMALLER than your desired resolution.

I've configured my game to run at 1440p, but if you want to play at 1080p or something else, you'll have to find the next smaller resolution at the link below:
https://pacoup.com/2011/06/12/list-of-true-169-resolutions/

No need to apologize for necroing I always feel a little excitement when someone else responds to the thread since it seems to have been at least somewhat useful in making up for the games inability to run on modern systems.

As for dgVoodoo I wasn't aware of it until a year ago and I also have not been checking the forums as often as I used to since my interest had died down significantly since then. In the next couple of days I will test dgVoodoo for its best settings once again(since I had already gotten it to work flawlessly at 1080p 144hz which was my original end goal).

Mainly I intend on correcting your misconceptions on how dgVoodoo actually works. dgVoodoo is an emulator for dx8 and lower. Basically its no different than dosbox or any of the endless Nintendo emulators. This means the game doesn't see your spooky highly advanced hardware.

edit 1:

Ok so I got my Dungeon Siege 1 reinstalled and got my dgVoodoo settings as well.
This is for running in fullscreen, while alt+enter dosen't crash it also locks the mouse in and outside the game so its not functional.
https://gyazo.com/b45c9493c2ed2b9b236e017c0605abcf
In here is where the bulk of the improvements appear.
The most important is the disable DX passthru since its what lets you enable the emulating features.
In the picture I have the GeForce 4800 ti as my emulated videocard and the reason is it gives the best fps and least graphical errors compared to the other emulation options.
At 1080p and no forced AA I get somewhere between 180-270 fps on a GTX 980.
The virtual 3D accelerated card gives about 80-140 fps on average in comparison though. I recommend testing each one at least once to see which gives the best fps/performances/least glitches.

The only other major setting is the option to set a forced resolution which is not actually necessary if you use this mod I quickly whipped up.
The useful part of the mod is that it lets you change res ingame but its not necessary its only for convenience.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1riyzctix4ud-Dysk7-_khqEMfHYdUkSD?usp=sharing

Setting a forced resolution will force the graphical output to that desired resolution, however the UI will use whatever the ingames resolution is set to. Also theres a weird graphical glitch around the cursor. The mod dosen't have this graphical error, however the UI will not scale so it will be microscopic at 2k or higher. However you can use the mod and force the resolution at the same time and the resolution slider will only affected the UI. This means you can play in 4k with the UI size of 1024x768(the games expected highest res).

As for aniosotropic filtering and AA you can tweak these on for more graphical fidelity at the cost of fps.

Toggle fast memory access if it dosen't work well, and having the dgVoodoo watermark displayed is also optional.

https://gyazo.com/534719482615ae1a4a61830e1c28b562

These settings are pretty self explanatory, do note as you cannot play DS1 in windowed mode unless you add fullscreen=false into the command line in a DS1 shortcut or the .ini in documents. You will also get fairly poor fps unless you use the virtual 3D accelerated card in the DX settings. I don't personally recommend playing DS1 in windowed mode since the fps seems to be capped at 60-75 and it will crash erratically when changing ingame res, as well as alt+enter crashing the game. It is seemingly stable otherwise so its probably best as a last resort.

[Rhiyo]

Helpful, but I get a Direct3D error trying to run at 2560x1440 :(

[JezuzLizard]

are you attempting to run dungeon siege 1 or 2 at a 2560x1440 resolution upscaled or at a native resolution on a 2560x1440 monitor?

dungeon siege 2 should run properly at upscaled resolutions, but dungeon siege 1 remains a pain. i actually went and tried again to get it to run upscaled but what my setup was that allowed me to run at upscaled resolutions is a mystery. =(

there is a mod that ports the dungeon siege 1 maps to the dungeon siege 2 engine here:
http://www.siegetheday.org/?q=node/1607

[JezuzLizard]

lol i was troubleshooting and i accidently tested a resolution of 900x1440(not a real resolution)
and i didn't get the error despite the the fact that the height exceeded my monitor's height(1920x1080). sadly the game rendered as if my monitor was bigger, this would explain why this crash is occuring because the game isn't using dynamic super resolution for some reason.

edit: for some reason if i unplug my second monitor the game's framerate tanks from 150 fps to 20 fps, it may somehow be trying to use my cpu's graphics even though my monitor is plugged into my graphics card.

[Cyph3r5w17ch]

I realise this is an old discussion but you seem to be the only person out there to have been able to run DS at 4k. Any idea why I am unable to run this at a native resolution of 3840x2160? I've edited the system_detail.gas file, and tried the command line option to force the resolution. The software loads and I can make a character but that's as far as I can get before I get an error that says to the effect of: d3d initialization failure: Dungeon Siege was unable to properly create a 3d graphics device. then I get a critical error (want to mention the game does run at 1920x1080, just will not run at my native 4k, or 2560x1440 at all)

[Turtle Team]

or you can just set your shadow setting to simple and that worked for me

[JezuzLizard]

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7lysuL1W-PtWUhVcWUyRDY5azQ?usp=sharing

Download both of those files. Installation is simple place the resolutions.dsres in the resources folder of yur DS1 installation and replace the system_detail.gas file with the one you downloaded.

This may or may not work but what you should do is select a functional resolution in the main menu and then create a game and attempt to the change the resolution ingame to a higher one.

I attempted to run DS1 in 4k upscaled but I was unable to replicate what I had done previously that allowed it to function. I have however determined that DS1 seems to cap the horizontal resolution to the maximum width of your monitor, but no such cap affects vertical resolution. This means while 2560x1440 is an invalid resolution on a 1920x1080 monitor; 1920x1440 is not.

Additionally altering the .ini with the paremeter fullscreen=false and using DSR to change your desktop resolution to 3840x2160 will allow you to run DS1 in a 1920x1080 window that only takes a 1/4 of the screen. However attempting to run DS1 in a 1920x1080 window on a 1920x1080 desktop resolution will give an error saying the resolution is too big for GDI to process.

[amaranthe_]

Awesome post! I couldn't get 1920x1080 to appear in the DSVideoConfig.exe but after I updated it I then noticed it changed DungeonSiege.ini file so I adjusted the resolution in there but I'm still not running at that resolution yet.

In my case I didn't need to replace the dungeonsiege.exe there was a catch. I can not start Dungeon Siege from Steam but instead have to use a Shortcut to the DungeonSiege.exe and while Steam is running it loads up fine.

Using ATI DeviceID.exe to setup my GeForce GTX 670.
VendorID: 0x10DE
DeviceID: 0x1189

[mrclean92124]

OK thanks for the posts guys...I think i got it.

1.
DS1 will not run under 2560x1440 period, but it will run 1920x1200 with simple shadows. Seems it works only with 4x3 resolutions, at least for me. I did get one resolution popup error, but click OK through it and the game runs fine.

1. Go to dungeon seige directory (DRIVE\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Dungeon Siege 1
2. Run DSVideoConfig.exe
3. Click OK with no changes (this generates the resolution entries in your ini)
4. Go to dungeon seige folder in your user profile (C:\Users\your_User\Documents\Dungeon Siege)
5. Edit DungeonSiege.ini
6. Enter correct resolutions
7. Save
8. Start up game and select simple shadows in video resolution
9. Enjoy

[JezuzLizard]

lel its actually possible probably to run ds at any res now with a program called DgVoodoo, I tested it and it can even force the menus res to whatever desired res so I imagine it would work then. It even scales the ui normally(lot of pixelation though)

[mrclean92124]

Thanks for the reply Emperor. After additional testing, I'm sad to report the method listed above, has significant issues. Mainly, there is desktop off to the right and bottom of the screen. The mouse will move quite a ways in those directions...so it seems pointless.

I will give your suggestion a try....thanks again and cheers!

[JezuzLizard]

ok let me get a picture of my exact settings that work fine for me as well as one other person I have suggested it to

[JezuzLizard]

ok so change your DgVoodoo settings to what the screenshots show and turn off shadows in game
General tab
https://gyazo.com/2d9faa127396c0ed50c8e1546692ed16
DirectX tab
https://gyazo.com/9ac411b1637b32315ba378e97c9a887c

Known issues: the windows loading icon flashes in game but can be fixed by alt tabbing,
the other one is with using the emulated gpu (Geforce 4800 ti) where a box that has a lower resolution than the rest of the game results in the weirdest bug i've ever seen in a game

[mrclean92124]

Haha... wow man... in real time. I just got dgvoodoo 2.53 set up...The way it runs is a bit counter intuitive...Posting some quick steps here if anybody else wants to try. It didn't take long at all. If you do the set up and use Emperor's configuration settings, You too can DS1 eye candy... It looks pretty damn good.

1. Download Dgvoodoo 2.53 or latest stable version.
2. Extract the zip to someplace like a temp folder... You are going to copy some files to the game directory, and if you need to set up a 2nd game, you will come back for these files.
3. You need to figure out if the game is a DX (Microsoft) or Glide (GL) graphics format. For Dungeon siege it's DX/MS.
4. Copy the following files out of the Dgvoodoo extracted folder and paste them into the game directory located at DRIVE\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Dungeon Siege 1\
a. D3D8.dll
b. D3DImm.dll
c. DDraw.dll
d. dgVoodooSetup.exe
5. Run dgVoodooSetup.exe and use the screen shots in preceding post to configure, apply, then close dgvoodoosetup. Now...for the counter intuitive part.
6. Just run the game, from steam, from the exe, it doesn't matter. DGVoodoo does it's thing and it looks amazing.

Thanks again Emperor and cheers all.

[¦ö¦ ƒ ì г e ¦ö¦]

Hi, sorry for the necro, but I just wanted to pitch in and say that dgVoodoo worked for me after I couldn't figure out how to get the game to be in windowed mode and also larger resolution. Thanks guys. There is no need to follow the instructions as stated by the OP; just use dgVoodoo.

However, I experienced a lot of lag trying to run the game with only 256 MB of VRAM, so I chose dgVoodoo's Virtual 3D card instead and picked 1024 MB. Helped a lot. I did some other tweaks, as described below.

--------------------------------------------

Here are my dgVoodoo settings (1440p, 59 Hz):
https://i.gyazo.com/550e1a113fc0924d36ccf670e6d7d85b.png
https://i.gyazo.com/b5c81eef5f580fba7ac129c2ce894c96.png

Here are my DSLOA.exe command-line arguments (just in case; they also work for dungeonsiege.exe):
nointro=true fullscreen=false nospacecheck=true bltonly=true

Here are my scaling settings on Windows 10:
https://i.gyazo.com/f389d772a1ba0fb43a804001127464dc.png

--------------------------------------------

Troubleshooting - Freezing

I noticed that if I DON'T make DungeonSiege.ini read-only with custom resolution settings, the game can fail to load and just freeze. To fix this, I opened up the ini and wrote in the following settings:

driver_description = NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 - Hardware
width = 2432
height = 1368
bpp = 32

It looks like this (make sure DungeonSiege.ini is read-only after this):
https://gyazo.com/c4af187bd10d55587f9ba7cfea80906c

To find driver_description, just run DSVideoConfig.exe and copy it exactly from the list. DungeonSiege.ini is generally located in your Documents folder, under the appropriate game (Dungeon Siege or Dungeon Siege LOA).

Note: dgVoodoo must be configured to run the game at 59 Hz, or the game will freeze as well.

Troubleshooting - Unsupported Windowed Resolutions

On windowed mode, to avoid the pop-up error that shows on the screen when you try to run the game on an unsupported resolution, make sure to pick a resolution (in DungeonSiege.ini above) that is SMALLER than your desired resolution.

I've configured my game to run at 1440p, but if you want to play at 1080p or something else, you'll have to find the next smaller resolution at the link below:
https://pacoup.com/2011/06/12/list-of-true-169-resolutions/

[JezuzLizard]

Originally posted by ¦ö¦ ƒ ì г e ¦ö¦:

Hi, sorry for the necro, but I just wanted to pitch in and say that dgVoodoo worked for me after I couldn't figure out how to get the game to be in windowed mode and also larger resolution. Thanks guys. There is no need to follow the instructions as stated by the OP; just use dgVoodoo.

However, I experienced a lot of lag trying to run the game with only 256 MB of VRAM, so I chose dgVoodoo's Virtual 3D card instead and picked 1024 MB. Helped a lot. I did some other tweaks, as described below.

--------------------------------------------

Here are my dgVoodoo settings (1440p, 59 Hz):
https://i.gyazo.com/550e1a113fc0924d36ccf670e6d7d85b.png
https://i.gyazo.com/b5c81eef5f580fba7ac129c2ce894c96.png

Here are my DSLOA.exe command-line arguments (just in case; they also work for dungeonsiege.exe):
nointro=true fullscreen=false nospacecheck=true bltonly=true

Here are my scaling settings on Windows 10:
https://i.gyazo.com/f389d772a1ba0fb43a804001127464dc.png

--------------------------------------------

Troubleshooting - Freezing

I noticed that if I DON'T make DungeonSiege.ini read-only with custom resolution settings, the game can fail to load and just freeze. To fix this, I opened up the ini and wrote in the following settings:

driver_description = NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 - Hardware
width = 2432
height = 1368
bpp = 32

It looks like this (make sure DungeonSiege.ini is read-only after this):
https://gyazo.com/c4af187bd10d55587f9ba7cfea80906c

To find driver_description, just run DSVideoConfig.exe and copy it exactly from the list. DungeonSiege.ini is generally located in your Documents folder, under the appropriate game (Dungeon Siege or Dungeon Siege LOA).

Note: dgVoodoo must be configured to run the game at 59 Hz, or the game will freeze as well.

Troubleshooting - Unsupported Windowed Resolutions

On windowed mode, to avoid the pop-up error that shows on the screen when you try to run the game on an unsupported resolution, make sure to pick a resolution (in DungeonSiege.ini above) that is SMALLER than your desired resolution.

I've configured my game to run at 1440p, but if you want to play at 1080p or something else, you'll have to find the next smaller resolution at the link below:
https://pacoup.com/2011/06/12/list-of-true-169-resolutions/

No need to apologize for necroing I always feel a little excitement when someone else responds to the thread since it seems to have been at least somewhat useful in making up for the games inability to run on modern systems.

As for dgVoodoo I wasn't aware of it until a year ago and I also have not been checking the forums as often as I used to since my interest had died down significantly since then. In the next couple of days I will test dgVoodoo for its best settings once again(since I had already gotten it to work flawlessly at 1080p 144hz which was my original end goal).

Mainly I intend on correcting your misconceptions on how dgVoodoo actually works. dgVoodoo is an emulator for dx8 and lower. Basically its no different than dosbox or any of the endless Nintendo emulators. This means the game doesn't see your spooky highly advanced hardware.

edit 1:

Ok so I got my Dungeon Siege 1 reinstalled and got my dgVoodoo settings as well.
This is for running in fullscreen, while alt+enter dosen't crash it also locks the mouse in and outside the game so its not functional.
https://gyazo.com/b45c9493c2ed2b9b236e017c0605abcf
In here is where the bulk of the improvements appear.
The most important is the disable DX passthru since its what lets you enable the emulating features.
In the picture I have the GeForce 4800 ti as my emulated videocard and the reason is it gives the best fps and least graphical errors compared to the other emulation options.
At 1080p and no forced AA I get somewhere between 180-270 fps on a GTX 980.
The virtual 3D accelerated card gives about 80-140 fps on average in comparison though. I recommend testing each one at least once to see which gives the best fps/performances/least glitches.

The only other major setting is the option to set a forced resolution which is not actually necessary if you use this mod I quickly whipped up.
The useful part of the mod is that it lets you change res ingame but its not necessary its only for convenience.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1riyzctix4ud-Dysk7-_khqEMfHYdUkSD?usp=sharing

Setting a forced resolution will force the graphical output to that desired resolution, however the UI will use whatever the ingames resolution is set to. Also theres a weird graphical glitch around the cursor. The mod dosen't have this graphical error, however the UI will not scale so it will be microscopic at 2k or higher. However you can use the mod and force the resolution at the same time and the resolution slider will only affected the UI. This means you can play in 4k with the UI size of 1024x768(the games expected highest res).

As for aniosotropic filtering and AA you can tweak these on for more graphical fidelity at the cost of fps.

Toggle fast memory access if it dosen't work well, and having the dgVoodoo watermark displayed is also optional.

https://gyazo.com/534719482615ae1a4a61830e1c28b562

These settings are pretty self explanatory, do note as you cannot play DS1 in windowed mode unless you add fullscreen=false into the command line in a DS1 shortcut or the .ini in documents. You will also get fairly poor fps unless you use the virtual 3D accelerated card in the DX settings. I don't personally recommend playing DS1 in windowed mode since the fps seems to be capped at 60-75 and it will crash erratically when changing ingame res, as well as alt+enter crashing the game. It is seemingly stable otherwise so its probably best as a last resort.