パポタ 空飛ぶ魔導店 (Papota)

Papota is a game that I found on a shareware disc, I’m gonna add some more context about that here at some point and I might also make a blog post about it but really I’m just writing this to make sure that the !more function is working correctly.

Fixing this game to run on modern systems

Step 1:

Go to the official page and download the game (you should also download the ball patch), then go to the DxWrapper GitHub page and download the latest version. If you haven’t already, you should also install Notepad++ as it’s sort of needed for the last step.

Step 2:

Unzip the Papota zip and place it wherever you want (it’s a portable application so it doesn’t need to be in a fixed location). Unzip the ball zip and replace the ‘ball.lcr’ in the root of the papota folder. Unzip DxWrapper, From this folder take dxwrapper.dll, dxwrapper.ini and d3d8.dll and place these 3 items into the root of the papota folder as well. The remaining contents of DxWrapper are not needed. Open dxwrapper.ini in Notepad++ and change DdrawCompat to 1, save the file and close it.

Step 3:

You can now launch Papota with start.exe. The game should now run at 60fps with window decorations looking like Windows 2000. If it’s still running slow, you may have to open it once in administrator mode. At this point however, the game may not render properly; the house and island on the main menu do not appear and in game certain triangles won’t render at some angles. If this is the case, open the オプション menu and select 画面設定.

now change the Driver設定 from T&L HAL to HAL(Hard) and click OK. The game should now render properly at 60Fps. from what I can tell this game runs basically perfectly when set up like this, there seems to be a minor amount of VSync delay but I think that’s a quirk of Direct3D.

Here’s a comparison of the 3 available rendering methods:

RGB Emulation (2x Speed)	Direct3D - HAL(Hard)	Direct3D - T&L HAL
slow and accurate	fast and accurate	fast and innaccurate

There’s a slight issue here in that these settings appear to not persist after closing the game, in fact every time a new area is loaded, it reverts back to using T&L HAL. It seems as though this render method is priorotised for whatever reason.

You can actually press ALT+F2 to quickly switch to HAL(Hard) but it’s pretty annoying to be doing this all the time (especially as F2 is used for camera controls by default). Luckily I have found a very simple fix for this.

Step 4:

This is a fix made entirely out of hopes and dreams: I want you to open the game executable start.exe with Notepad++, hit CTRL + F and look for “T&L” (which should appear exactly ONCE at line 10125).

Now replace this word with anything, as long as there are the same number of characters it doesn’t matter. Save the file and close Notepad++, the game should still be able to run but now T&L HAL is no longer selectable because we quite literally “removed” it so the game defaults to HAL(Hard).

I don’t know why I even tried this last step but to be honest anything seems possible at 3:30 AM so you’re welcome, I believe this is a part of the executable that initializes rendering modes, if the hardware doesn’t have that mode it gets grayed out. Naturally if you put in garbage data, it tries to call something that doesn’t exist and gets a negative response every time… or I mean something like that, what do I look like? a programmer?

It took me several hours to figure all of this out so hopefully I was able to save you some time. If you want more information about how to play the game, don’t ask me because I’ve literally never played it. I’ve been too busy trying to get the damn thing to work properly. I can’t even read Japanese that well so it’s pretty hard for me to play (it makes good study though).

Oh I just realized I totally forgot to write about locale emulators, I set my system locale to Japanese so that I don’t encounter such issues though you may need it if you’re seeing mojibake.