SpecialK ODS not showing and hotkeys not working.

[Nils]

Hi, I was following this guide https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=933337066
And I installed the Special K Intall Manager v0.7.5.17 with SK_0_10_2_1,4098
But the OSD doesn't show up and I cannot make the hotkeys work.
I hope someone can help me.

I am trying to make it work with Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver to try to import larger textures than the hardcoded 256x256.

But I also tried it with VVVVVV without success.

Legacy of Kain: Soull Reaver profile - https://pastebin.com/EsuGkcJ6

Thank you!

[Aemony]

From what I can gather Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver seems to be a DirectX 7 game, meaning it doesn't actually make use of DirectX 9. It wouldn't surprise me if the only reason you have those logs are because Special K happened to hook Windows' compatibility layer applied to the game.

What you most likely need to do is to install the dgVoodoo 2 plugin for Special K, or for the game, and then see if it starts working.

dgVoodoo 2 translates DirectX 1-8 to DirectX 11, which SK will probably have a better success at hooking and manipulating.

[Nils]

Thank you Aemony!

I have the plugin in the third party folder, the only difference from the one on the tutorial is that mine is called dgVoodooCpl.exe (but it matches the newest versions of the voodoo plugin)

I think something else might be blocking SpecialK from running properly.

The OSD doesn't show for other games as well, same goes for the hotkeys.

https://pastebin.com/YNQqchw9 Minit

The only one that I manage the to get a crash was Kingdom Come https://pastebin.com/KQqQAjgm


Are there any kind of troubleshoot to figure out what might be causing this?

[Aemony]

... Really weird...

Anyway, the logs in general look mostly fine. What you can do is these things:

1. Disable Ansel: https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Nvidia#Ansel

2. Have the global injector of Special K enabled, then hold down Ctrl+Shift when starting e.g. Minit, and then on the compatibility menu that opens select DirectX/Direct3D 11.

3. If it still doesn't work, turn off the global injector, copy SpecialK32.dll from \My Documents\My Mods\Special K to e.g. the game folder of Minit and rename it to dxgi.dll and then try launching the game.

I'm starting to think you might have to make local installs of Special K in the various game folders instead. The logs indicate that both Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Minit failed because Special K hooked DirectX/Direct3D 9, which the games didn't end up using to draw stuff, which is understandable as Legacy of Kain seems to be using DirectX 7, while Minit is according to its PCGamingWiki article a Direct3D 11 title.

Kingdom Come's crash log sadly doesn't say anything beyond that the crash occurred in some startup code of the game. It is possible that game will work if you copy SpecialK64.dll over to its game folder and rename the DLL file for dxgi.dll instead.

[Nils]

Thank you very much Aemony. The step 2 and 3 worked for most games. I am still struggling with Soul Reaver.

I tried all the wrappers but it did not work.
I also tried to install d3d8 wrapper using the ctrl+shift method, it says there is no .dll on the dgvoodoo folder, so I created a new folder with that name and tried with both the files that came with the installation (dgvoodoo2) and the ones on plugins_x86.7z from https://gitlab.com/Kaldaien/SpecialK/-/tags/sk_0_8_12

But the game do not start if I use d3d8.dll.

The crash log as they appear on the game folder https://pastebin.com/zNBU3LxP

[Kaldaien]

That log's not going to be helpful at all because I don't even know where that's from :-\

All of Special K's logs are in the logs/ subdirectory.

[Nils]

That file appeared when I tried to install local manually.

This is the one in the specialk/game/logs folder

https://pastebin.com/3CXDs6bP

when I use the d3d8.dll I need to run the game using compatibility mode or it won't open but also the special K won't work.

If I try to open without the compatibility I get those crash reports on the special K folder.

[Kaldaien]

You're really throwing the book at this thing, lol.... I don't have complete support for DirectInput7 or DirectDraw. There are very few games that use both of those things together. Try turning off DirectDraw hooks in d3d8.ini.

[Nils]

Thank you for helping me Kaldaien.

The game works, but I still have no ODS, I wonder if it is a problem with the game itself, even the nvidia shadow play opens as another another window instead as overlay.

SpecialK.log + d8d3.log + modules.log https://pastebin.com/3Jm7RbHu


Someone asked on r/GameUpscale if it was possible to improve the graphics of the Soul Reaver.

The sad part is that the PC port is from PS1 not Dreamcast, so everything is hardcoded to work with 256x256 textures. One of the most experienced at the board suggested the SpecialK but I am new to code injection, I am trying to figure out if I can use it to make the gamme look at the high res textures.