DSJ3 under Windows 10 - issues

Technical support for DSJ3.
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ttt069
Posts: 1
Joined: 26 Aug 2017, 13:51

DSJ3 under Windows 10 - issues

Post by ttt069 »

Need some suppoert. Installed DSJ3 under Windows 10. When I start the program DSJ3 is asking fo DirectX 8.0 or later to start, but that is part of windows 10 (DirectX Versio 12). I installed DirectX 8.0 patch found in the net but it still doesn't work. Has someone some ideas? Thanks for Your help
Martin Kafka
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Joined: 23 Jan 2007, 20:31
Location: Czech Republic
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Re: DSJ3 under Windows 10 - issues

Post by Martin Kafka »

You need to enable/install DirectPlay. It's required for many older games, such as GTA San Andreas etc. You should be automatically prompted to do so upon launch (as was my case).
If running Setup.exe or DSJ3.exe doesn't automatically trigger the installation for you, you can also manually enable it using this video tutorial.

However, even if you eventually get it to run, I believe DSJ3 suffers from the same issue as pre-1.6.2 versions of DSJ4 did.
It's the constant stutter (despite fps being quite high) that occurs which severely affects the overall smoothness, although it's not as game breaking as in DSJ4 perhaps because DSJ3 is not remotely that CPU/GPU intensive.
In Jussi's words, it has something to do with backwards DirectX (in)compatibility and extremely slow rendering of primitives which require software vertex processing.
Jussi fixed this issue for DSJ4 by making his own version of indexed vertex blending.
I guess it's rather unlikely he'll do the same for DSJ3 anytime soon, given its decreasing popularity. It surely would be nice, though;-)
Martin Kafka
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Re: DSJ3 under Windows 10 - issues

Post by Martin Kafka »

I'm happy to report that with the latest 18.1.1 AMD drivers the issue is completely gone, no stuttering whatsoever.
Maybe this was just AMD related? They did some DX9 optimizing so it very well might be the case.
Martin Kafka
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Re: DSJ3 under Windows 10 - issues

Post by Martin Kafka »

I investigated the stuttering issue a bit more since it's been continuously coming back and I think I've finally found the culprit and solution.
Despite my previous beliefs, it has nothing to do with hardware or graphics driver installed.
If you're experiencing stuttering in DSJ3 on a modern PC, you need to adjust the Windows system timer resolution.
Now, the question is why this happens only on some configurations (our 5 year old laptop with Windows 8.1 does not suffer from this issue), also I don't remember this ever happening on Windows XP and 7. It may be exclusive to Windows 10.
The reason why I thought it may have been fixed by a driver update is that some apps modify the setting when launched.
So when I listened to music (e.g. with foobar2000) while playing, the timer was automatically set to 1ms.
With the default system timer resolution of 15.625ms, fps varies between 75-90 with subtle, yet clearly noticeable stutter.
Setting the timer to 1ms almost miraculously makes the game run absolutely butter smooth at rock-solid stable 100 fps.

There's a handy tool for checking and modifying your Windows system timer resolution. You can download it here.

There are many articles dealing with this if you want to dig deeper into the topic:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/ ... ts-wasted/
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads ... es.785101/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comm ... res_how_i/

So there. Hope this helps folks with the same issue.

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Tom2
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Re: DSJ3 under Windows 10 - issues

Post by Tom2 »

Ran into the same problem and Martin's solution worked perfectly. Thx man :)
DSJ3 TL: 7755.36m (#39), peak: 1325 (#490)
DSJ4 TL: 3550.97m (#3), online: 3506.29m (#11), peak: 1942 (#5)

DSJ3 PB: 318.88m (#19)
DSJ4 PB: 242.88m (#2)
roberson
Posts: 11
Joined: 16 Sep 2020, 18:43
Location: TX

Re: DSJ3 under Windows 10 - issues

Post by roberson »

Yeah, that was the reason I joined to the forums in the first place.
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