Scheduler Improvement: Enhances frame rate consistency using timeBeginPeriod for more precise timing.
Memory Management: Addresses crashes related to memory limits on modern systems.
Display Reset Fix: Prevents game lockups after losing Direct3D handles in 8.1.141 games.
DirectPlay Patch: Removes deprecated networking components, improving startup times and compatibility.
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for developers and players of GameMaker games from versions 7.0 to 8.1. It ensures smoother gameplay, better performance on modern systems, and compatibility fixes, enhancing overall user experience without altering core game mechanics or requiring additional libraries.
README
gm8x_fix
gm8x_fix is a patcher that fixes certain issues in games made with
GameMaker 7.0, 8.0, and 8.1. You can download the latest release from the
Releases tab.
How do I use it?
Drag the executable file for your game onto gm8x_fix.exe. Or, if you're a
commandline nerd, you can run it with:
gm8x_fix [options] FILE
Available options include:
-s Remove commandline output and apply any available patches.
-nb Disable the automatic backup. Please back up manually if you use this.
-ni Don't offer input lag patch.
-nj Don't offer joystick patch.
-ns Don't offer scheduler patch.
-nm Don't offer memory patch.
-nd Don't offer DirectPlay patch.
If you're automating patching, take note that the program will exit with code
1 on failure.
For building, you can just build the C file with your favourite compiler, it
doesn't have any dependencies.
gm8x_fix currently supports games made in the following versions of GameMaker:
7.0
8.0
8.1.65
8.1.71
8.1.91
8.1.135
8.1.140
8.1.141
The issues this fixes, and how it fixes them
The input lag patch
When running a game, GameMaker 8 runs the game code, waits for the next frame
to start, and then puts the image on the screen. This adds a frame of input
lag. Studio and later swap the waiting and putting the image on the screen.
The input lag patch changes it to act more like Studio: run the game code, then
put the frame on the screen immediately before waiting for the next frame.
The joystick patch
Early versions of GameMaker have a terrible implementation of joystick
support, which can cause games to slow down if joysticks are installed but not
plugged in. This slowdown exists on games that don't use the joystick
functions, but is much worse on games that do. This occurs because every frame,
it polls the first two joysticks even if they aren't connected, and polling
joysticks that aren't connected causes a massive search through the registry,
which takes up a lot of time.
This patch replaces literally every call to the joystick API with some code
that pretends there are no joysticks connected. Basically, it completely
disables joystick support.
Between frames, GameMaker calls
Sleep
in order to limit the framerate. Unfortunately, this function isn't very precise,
which means games can sleep for longer than they were intended to, which may lead
to sluggish or inconsistent framerates on some computers. There is a function called
timeBeginPeriod
which allows us to make the function more precise, but GameMaker doesn't use it
out of the box. This patch invokes that function at game start and improves
the precision. The patch overwrites the import for one of the joystick functions,
so using the scheduler patch without the joystick patch may cause issues.
Here's a YouTube video with a more
detailed explanation.
Some games also run into issues on some newer computers where the game crashes
on startup with the message "Unexpected error occured when running the game" or
"Out of memory".
This can, on some games, be fixed by enabling the flag in the header that tells
the OS the program can understand addresses bigger than 2GB. Shoutouts to
these guys
for finding that.
The display reset patch
In all GameMaker 8.1.141 games, when the game loses its Direct3D handle (for
example, through the computer being locked), without any surfaces having been
created, the game will lock up. This patch makes it behave the same as if you
had created and deleted a surface: it will try to get a new handle, then if
that fails, wait for five seconds and try again, and if that fails it will
close. This issue only affects specifically 8.1.141.
The DirectPlay patch
GameMaker games use DirectPlay for networking, but loading the DirectPlay DLL
on newer versions of Windows brings up a prompt because DirectPlay is
deprecated. In fact, on newer versions of Windows, it just doesn't work at all,
and does nothing other than drastically extend startup times.
The patch replaces the attempt to load DirectPlay with an attempt to load
literally nothing. This somehow doesn't break anything unless you're using the
networking functions.
So what's the catch?
If the game used the builtin joystick functions, it will no longer work with
joysticks if you apply the joystick patch. Some games use an external library
like joydll
or the newer gm82joy
for joystick support. Those will work fine.
The scheduler patch overwrites some debug logging, but that shouldn't cause any
issues.
I've heard reports of the input lag patch making the framepacing less
consistent. See how it feels, and decide for yourself which you prefer.
The DirectPlay patch will break GameMaker's built-in networking. Any calls to
the networking functions will probably trigger an access violation. If this
causes problems outside of multiplayer modes in any games, open an issue and
I'll make a less janky solution.