After completing Dracula 1 and 2 this week I've decided to give the 3rd game in the series a whirl as I've read that it is of higher quality with various praise for the game.

So far the experience is proving poor. I've just installed Dracula 3 using GOG Galaxy, and upon launching the game after a 5+ second time delay a Microids window pops up on screen at an approximate resolution of around 1024x768 bound to the upper left corner of my 2560x1600 display. After the opening splash screens finish, the game's movie cut-scene takes over retaining this icon-sized window on my screen which is completely unmovable.

I went into the "Options" screen and there are zero options to change the resolution or set the game to full screen. Why on earth any game would default to running in a Window is beyond me. Sure, make windowed operation an option if desired, but never make it the default and never make it the ONLY option.

Aside from that, moving the mouse pointer is extremely slow and lagged like mad making the game completely unplayable both in terms of the size of the tiny window, and the input-lag.

I've poked through the forums here and see people suggesting various 3rd party utilities that can be used to do this or that, and while those are nice to have as optional ways to enhance a game, I don't think anyone should be forced to download a utility from a 3rd party website just to play a game to begin with.

I'm curious if anyone has encountered this problem and has found a solution that does not require 3rd party off-site solutions to play this game, using only config files, registry editing or similar? I'll probably contact GOG support about it also as they're often quite helpful.

TIA

I found a solution to make the game go full screen instead of running in a fixed position window in the upper left hand side of the screen.

Edit config.ini in the game's installed folder, and change: "bFullscreen=0" to "bFullscreen=1"

After making this change, the game starts up full screen @ 1024x768. There are still 2 symptoms observed which may be a single problem that still remains as in the windowed mode.

1) Extremely low frames per second. I do not have an FPS counter to measure it presently but by eye I would say it is about 10-15 FPS which is completely and totally an unplayable slide show. Even the video cut scenes are at a choppy frame rate.

2) Extreme mouse input lag. The mouse pointer jumps lagged in about 1/2 inch increments around the screen making it completely unplayable.

For purposes of comparison:
AMD FX8350
32GB 1866MHz RAM
AMD Radeon HD7850 2GB

I'm going to try setting the CPU affinity to see if it is a poor multi-threading issue causing cache thrashing next. Will report back if that made any difference.

I ALT-TABbed out of the game to set the affinity and Windows throws up an error "The operation could not be completed. Access is denied." when trying to set the affinity for the game executable that is running. I confirmed that setting the affinity for other processes works. Very strange, it is the first time I've ever had Windows prevent me from changing CPU affinity for a running process. Going to try to change it via launch by modifying the short cut instead to use the Windows START command.

Wont be able to launch it via GOG Galaxy to do that however. If it works, I'll have to explore modding the goggame*.info file to change the affinity or making a batch file or whatever.

Sorry to see you are having problems with this Dracula game. I enjoyed reading your reviews of the first two games in the "Games finished" thread and I was looking forward to see what you thought of this one. The GOG version worked flawlessly for me in Windows 7 when I played it a couple of years ago, so I've had a dig around and I reinstalled it to see what I could discover:

- The old installer "setup_dracula_trilogy_2.0.0.4" had full screen as the default setting, whereas the latest one has windowed. I'd guess the change is due to the problems you have experienced.

- On my main PC (Windows 7 64-bit, Nvidia GTX650Ti, 1440x900 screen) the game runs flawlessly in windowed mode. However, in full screen mode videos flicker badly, as does the cursor and the frame rate seems very low.

- On my laptop (Windows 7 64-bit, Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics, 1366x768 screen) the game runs flawlessly in both windowed and full screen modes (although the windowed mode is cut off at the bottom by the task bar). This could be down to the integrated graphics, or it could be the fact that the screen has the same vertical dimension as the windowed mode i.e. 768 pixels.

- From searching the net, this is a widespread problem, although most of the information relates to Nvidia rather than AMD. As far as Nvidia goes, the problems seem to have been caused by changes to the drivers a long time ago (after 180 or so) and have never been fixed. I haven't read of a simple solution.

Sorry I couldn't be of greater assistance. From reading your posts you obviously have far more technical knowledge than me, but could you set your desktop at a lower resolution, so the game window fills a greater proportion of it? (I know this will affect the picture quality but it may be a worthwhile trade-off.)

IMHO the third game is by far the best of the series and well worth playing if you can get it working to your satisfaction.

Best of luck!

Thanks for the reply and info on your success etc. Yeah, I found mostly comments about nVidia also but am having similar sounding issues with AMD and the problems do sound widespread for this game. :/ For me, the performance/low FPS/input lag problem is pretty much exactly the same in fullscreen mode as in windowed mode which kind of sucks. :/

I have not yet tried setting the actual desktop resolution to 1024x768 which is the fixed resolution of the game, but I suppose that is worth a try also. I could also experiment with changing the colour depth. Another option I thought of would be changing the video driver to VESA/Safe mode to see if that works just for troubleshooting, and finally - trying to run the game inside a virtual machine in Windows XP or in Linux even.

I've temporarily switched to playing Back to the Future (half way done episode 3 ATM) but once I complete the whole game I will likely give Dracula 3 another shot with some of these new suggestions. I wrote GOG support about the issue too but haven't checked my email to see if they responded yet, will do that tomorrow.

Worst case, I do have an ancient PC here with XP on it that hasn't been turned on in like 3 years. I could throw the game on a USB stick and perhaps try it on there, it has a Radeon 9800Pro in it so still ATI, but ancient. :oP Would really suck to have to use XP though hehe.

Thanks again for your reply!

I tried this solution and it works fine for me so was definitely worth the try for me, thanks.

Hoping that I will not be producing noise (rather than adding useful info) by necroposting in 2020, I have managed to run this wonderful game full screen without any flickering or other lag issues. Here's how:

(1) Go to the game directory.

(2) Open the config.ini file in a text editor.

(3) Change the line bFullScreen=0 into bFullScreen=1. Save the file.

(4) Go to the PC Gaming Wiki page for the game (apologies for not including the link, I get the "cannot post any links at this moment" message).

(5) Scroll down to the section for the Blank screen on Windows 10 issue.

(6) Download WinD3D from the link shown there.

(7) Unzip the downloaded WineD3DForWindows_2.6.zip file and copy all the contents of the zip (not just the DLLs for DirectX 9) to the game folder.

(8) Right click on the dracula3.exe file in the game folder and set the compatibility to Windows XP (Service Pack 2).

That's it. In my case (Windows 10 64-bit running on Ryzen 5 2600 with Geforce GTX 1660 ti) the game runs full screen flawlessly.

Thanks Partavantis,

your solution worked fine for me

The game does not run flawlessly, at least for me, but it does run stably. The frame rate is very slow, and this is confirmed by others who have used the patch. Are you aware of a fix for this?

The game is unplayable on Windows 8.1, same symptoms as the first 2 posters in this thread(which started way back in 2016, by the way) Too bad because I enjoyed Dracula 1 and 2 , and GoG states game is playable on Windows (Vista, 7, 8. Obviously it was never tested properly.

Tom

Thank you, but in my case, it does run full screen, however, the window from before is now just surrounded by black borders, which is not my idea of "full screen".

Thanks anyway for getting it to run for me though.

Thanks for all this info - the game has launched with no problems after following your very clear and easy instructions.

I still can't get the game running properly despite all the advice in this thread. Other threads suggest there really is mixed success.
Maybe it comes down to something like graphics card and driver or something like that - it's not simply due to Windows 10 itself.

Hello,
How do you "set the compatibility to Windows XP (Service Pack 2)." in your 8th point ?

paravantis' approach worked for me, except that I also had to run the dracula3.exe file as an administrator.
Once I did that after following all the steps above. the game works fine.