The people who grew up in the late 90’s and early 2000’s often miss the unique generation of PC games that dominated those times like the Diablo 1, Quake 1, Blood 1, Unreal Tournament 1, Need for Speed 2 and more. The problem is that even though they will really love to play these games once again just to have that nostalgia of their school days, their new computers do not permit them to run these very old games. These older games often use the very old versions of Microsoft DirectX (mostly the version 6.0 or 7.0) and since the modern version of DirectX has been completely remodeled, they just won’t run on newer computers.
This is where a really very useful program DxWnd can help you out. This clever program can manipulate how the games connect with the DirectX installed on our modern PC making the games think they are still running on a relatively older Windows PC with older version of DirectX.
You can start by launching DxWnd followed by adding the games to its window. To add the games, you can simply drag-n-drop the games EXE files on to the DxWnd window. For example, “Blood 2 : The Chosen” game has the EXE file Blood2.exe and you can drag-n-drop this on to the DxWnd window. As soon as you do this, a new window will open up where you can configure how DxWnd will handle playing this newly added game.
In the configuration window, you can change the video settings, game resolution, input settings, DirectX settings, manipulating the DirectX version, DirectX & Direct3D tweaks, and customize which libraries (GDI or GDI+) to be loaded for a game. Most people will leave these settings at their default values.
After this, you can launch the added games by double-clicking on their icons in the DxWnd window. The games will launch properly and will run as specified by the configurations you have set for them.
Conclusion: DxWnd helps run older games on newer Windows computers by manipulating some of the DirectX related settings. For example, it can make the games think that your Windows 10 PC has DirectX 6.0 installed.
You can download DxWnd from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxwnd/