Discworld Noir: Playing it again, Sam

Apr 12
4 min read

A guide to running the third Discworld game, Discworld Noir on a Win10 platform. Discworld Noir was developed by Perfect Entertainment and released in 1999 by GT Interactive and Infogrames. Like the first two games, it remains a point and click adventure title. However, the colourful Discworld environments of the past games are replaced with a film noir style of 1940's detective movies, which is apt given you play the Discworld's first PI, Lewton.

Discworld Noir can be played in an aspect correct fashion under the PCem emulator, but achieving the same result natively in Win10 takes a little more work.

History

There has only been a single version of Discworld Noir, all editions of the game from initial retail and budget re-releases have used the same version. There haven't been any official patches released, which makes this a very short history.

Discworld Noir fix by loma

Considered to be the only fix required to run the game under WinXP to Win10, this patch was created by loma in 2018 and is still considered the optimum (and only) patch required. It is a file replacement patch, distributed as a zip archive, the contents of which should be extracted to the Discworld Noir installation folder. The patch is available from:

There are two remaining issues with this patch, the mouse can leave the bottom and right side of the screen, this is considered a very minor issue. The loma fix will always cause the screen to stretch to it's full width. This is more of an issue for this game, written for a 4:3 aspect ratio, but can be corrected with a utility.

Retail media

This guide assumes any physical cds will be ripped to an image file, to reduce wear and tear on media and drives. The retail version of Discworld Noir does not contain cd audio and can be ripped to a data only .iso format.

At present there are no releases on digital platforms.

Game management

As a windows game running natively, the installation folder will be created by the Discworld Noir installer. However some limited game management is still useful for files used in the setup.

The installation folder and setup files for Discworld Noir and other Windows games can be found in the same folder (my own, as an example):

D:\Games\Win\<Game folders>
D:\Games\Win\Discworld Noir
D:\Games\Win\Discworld Noir Setup

The following setup folders can be used:

cd - to store any cd images.
patch - to store a copy of recommended patches or compatibility tools.

Installation

The Discworld Noir installer app is a 32-bit installer which remains compatible with Win10. The installer requires all 3 cds/cd images to be used, so before starting the install, ensure you can swap cd images (or eject and mount a different cd image) in the virtual cd drive.

Patching

The Discworld Noir fix by loma requires the contents of the zip archive to be extracted to the DiscWorld Noir installation folder, overwriting any files as required. The following files are included in the patch:

dn.exe
tin3_dxd.exe

Wrappers and utilities

All wrappers and utilities are optional and they may be considered unnecessary, in which case the installation of the wrapper or utility may be omitted.

dgVoodoo2

The film noir style of the game means the environment remains dark throughout the game. As there is no longer a gamma setting in the Discworld Noir options, another solution is required to increase brightness. For this we can use dgVoodoo2. This guide uses the latest version of dgVoodoo2, version 2.87.1 (at time of writing).

This can be obtained from the dgVoodoo2 GitHub repository in Releases. To install:

Download dgVoodoo2 (dgVoodoo2_87_1.zip) and extract to a new folder.

Copy the following dgVoodoo2 files to the Discworld Noir installation folder. Note: the paths are not important you just need to add the files:

dgVoodooCpl.exe
MS\x86\D3D8.dll
MS\x86\D3D9.dll
MS\x86\D3DImm.dll
MS\x86\DDraw.dll

Download and extract the dgVoodoo.conf in the below zip file, to the Discworld Noir installation folder:

Note: This config file does not change the brightness but can be used with Discworld Noir to do so.

DSOAL

DSOAL (DirectSound via OpenAL) can be used to optimise sound through headphones. The latest version is used, DSOAL r692, (DSOAL_r692.zip) available from DSOAL GitHub Releases.

The following files should be extracted from the zip/7z archive:

\DSOAL\Win32\dsoal-aldrv.dll
\DSOAL\Win32\dsound.dll
\DSOAL\Win32\alsoft.ini

Note: the file paths are not copied into the Discworld Noir installation folder, just the files themselves.

Those wishing to use headphones can change settings in alsoft.ini to optimise sound.

QRes

QRes allows the screen resolution to be changed, compatible with the loma fix, it was created by by Anders Kjersem. The loma fix always uses the full width of the screen, so QRes is used to force the loma fix to use a 4:3 aspect ratio resolution. The latest version is v1.1, available from:

MajorGeeks.Com

The utility is distributed as a zip archive (qres.zip), the contents of which should be extracted to the Discworld Noir installation folder.

A batch file (.bat) can be used to set a 4:3 aspect ratio, run Discworld Noir and after quitting the game, return to the original resolution. The following is an example batch file:

@echo off
D:\Games\Win\DiscNoir\QRes.exe /x 1440 /y 1080        # set a 4:3 aspect ratio
D:\Games\Win\DiscNoir\dn.exe                          # run Discworld Noir
D:\Games\Win\DiscNoir\QRes.exe /x 3840 /y 2160        # back to original resolution

Running

To run the loma fix only (using the full screen width):

dn.exe

To run with a QRes corrected aspect ratio, create a batch file suitable for your hardware (e.g. dn.bat) and run it with:

dn.bat

To run with the Playnite game library manager, set a play action to dn.exe, and set the QRes commands in the script section. The following shows example script commands: