lietu: I've been playing Jagged Alliance 2 since when it was new, but I never really got big into the v1.13 mod. I recently thought I'd have a big of fun with Jagged Alliance 2, only to find it halfway impossible to experience it in a reasonable way. Also being a live streamer, I have somewhat unusual requirements.
If you just fire up the game as it comes from GoG, you'll get something like 640x480 resolution, which doesn't work well with modern screens, or capture cards. The "Jagged Alliance 2 Stracciatella" -runtime just makes the map view show more of the map, and everything else really tiny.
I went through a fair bit of trouble to figure out the steps to get v1.13 running smoothly on a modern computer running Windows 10, and to set it up as close to vanilla Jagged Alliance 2 -experience as seems to be possible, and I wrote a quick guide on how to do it.
It goes through installing the game and the v1.13 release (+ patch), setting up WineD3D libraries to fix some UI lag issues, compatibility settings to fix windowed mode, and then configuring the game for vanilla.
There are certain aspects of v1.13 that do not get reverted with the settings (e.g. character creation), and it has a few bugs (e.g. you can't train militia in SAM sites without editing configs manually), but it is about the best one can get from JA2 at this time as far as I can tell.
I wrote the guide in Google Docs, which has a bit better formatting. I pasted the contents below with some quick formatting, but the "original" is available at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13lWGYCmZgQjexsKEjf5yu3QmryuPkohm1_NnQSUnIgw/edit?usp=sharing -----
How to set up Jagged Alliance 2 … with the v1.13 community patch, for the best near-vanilla experience. It takes a few steps to get it working nicely on modern computers, but it’s doable.
- Install Jagged Alliance 2
- Install v1.13 release and patch
- Install WineD3D libraries
- Configure compatibility settings
- Configure game settings
Install Jagged Alliance 2 Tested on GoG version, Steam version should likely work fine too as the game executables are overwritten anyway during the process.
Find your game folder, you’ll need it for the following steps.
In Steam:
Right-click on the game, choose Properties. Go to the Local files -tab, and click Browse local files...
In GOG Galaxy:
Select the game. Under the More -dropdown choose Manage Installation and click Show folder
Install v1.13 release and patch Go to the JA2 v1.13 Downloads -page at
http://ja2v113.pbworks.com/w/page/4218334/Downloads Download BOTH the “Current official Release Version” -file, and “Current official Update Version for Release XXXX” assuming the versions match (e.g. Release Version: Build: 7435, Update Version for Release 7435).
At the time this was written you should end up with 2 files, that you should move in the folder Jagged Alliance 2 is installed to:
JA2_113_FullRelease_English_7435.exe
JA2_113_UpdateForRelease7435_English_7609.exe
Double-click on the “FullRelease” -file and let it extract it’s contents in the Jagged Alliance 2 folder.
Double-click on the “UpdateForRelease” -file and similarly let it extract it’s contents in the Jagged Alliance 2 folder. Afterwards double-click on the “zPatch.bat” -file that will finish installing the update.
Install WineD3D libraries The game isn’t very compatible with recent versions of DirectX, if you have issues with the mouse cursor being laggy in the game or similar we’ll need to patch it up a bit to get that working. Specifically WineD3D version 1.1.38 is known to work on recent versions of Windows.
Download the wined3d.exe from
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/gnu.org/savannah/wined3d/1.1.38/
DO NOT run it (it could wreck your Windows installation a bit), just use 7-Zip or similar to extract the contents of the .exe -file. You should end up with a set of folders, one of which is $SYSDIR. Copy everything from inside the $SYSDIR -directory in the Jagged Alliance 2 folder. I.e. you should end up with the .dll -files etc. in the same level as the ja2. exe -file.
Configure compatibility settings If you want to run Jagged Alliance 2 in windowed mode, you’ll have to enable some compatibility settings.
Open the Jagged Alliance 2 -folder, right-click on ja2. exe and choose Properties. Go to the Compatibility -tab and enable Reduced colour mode. Choose 16-bit (65536) colour -mode. Also check Run this program in compatibility mode for, and choose Windows 95 from the drop-down. Click OK.
Configure game settings After the above steps, the game will likely launch with a black screen, and includes a lot of heavily modded content. To get it to run properly, and to get a vanilla-like experience you will need to configure it.
Go to the Jagged Alliance 2 -folder and run INI Editor.exe. You should get a window with fairly complex looking settings available.
To get a vanilla-like experience open up the first dropdown labeled Select JA2 v1.13 MOD and choose vfs_config. JA2Vanilla.ini.
To get the game to open up nicely and not give you a black screen, you’ll want to choose FALSE from the Play Intro -dropdown.
Next choose a resolution you’re happy with from the Game Screen Resolution -dropdown (800x600 is the minimum for this modded version to work). If you did the compatibility -mode changes you can also enable windowed mode by selecting TRUE from the Windowed Mode -dropdown.
Click on the Save -icon on the top left!
Click the big START -button. If everything went fine, the game should now run fine.
-----
Since creating this a few of my friends have tried getting into Jagged Alliance 2 and found it a difficult game to get into. I tried to create a quick tutorial on how to get into the game as a complete newbie so that the experience should be a fairly pleasant one. Hopefully it covers most of the clumsy points of the getting started process:
https://youtu.be/za9ZxUor66o Wow; why TF couldn't GoG do this to begin with. Game resolution is incredibly low and the framerate is around 1-5FPS; it is unbelievable to me GoG gets away with releasing such a mess.
