So, I just got a new rig and upgraded to windows 7...

[Emarrel]

... which inevitably leads to problems.

Well, not really. Everything has been pretty really good so far, until I wanted to play some Touhou.

First of all, I'm getting frame drops and stuttering. This stops happening when I disable Aero, but that isn't a very elegant solution. If anyone else has experienced this and can tell me what the issue is, I'd appreciate it.

Second of all:


Windows XP had a filter applied when I ran the game in windowed mode and above 640x480. Windows 7 doesn't do that, and it isn't easy on the eyes.

Thirdly, unicode has been weird as hell. For some things, it works fine. For other things, no so much. Observe:



About half my Japanese tags are garbled, but display fine when in a media player.

Also, the vsync patch for EoSD isn't working at all.

And I may as well get a few things out of way to speed things up:
Both monitors are set to 60hz
I have the Japanese language pack installed. Setting my locale to Japanese does not solve the garbled text problem.
I'm running:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Intel i7 960 (4x3.2ghz)
12GB DDR3 RAM
nVidia GTX 580

[Momiji]

For the filename issue, you probably have mixed character sets when it's probably expecting straight-Unicode.  Not sure how to fix this off-hand in Windows.

As for the Aero problem, what're your hardware specs?

[Emarrel]

For the filename issue, you probably have mixed character sets when it's probably expecting straight-Unicode.  Not sure how to fix this off-hand in Windows.

As for the Aero problem, what're your hardware specs?

That would explain why about half of my tags are broken. Still doesn't solve the garbled title bars though.

My system specs are at the bottom of my post.

[Momiji]

My system specs are at the bottom of my post.

Derp, I missed all that.  Sorry.

Not sure about your Aero problem, you might just want to disable it.  You can also try changing the game's launch settings, like turning on Compatibility Mode (try XP SP3), and turning off Desktop Composition and Visual Themes.

[Emarrel]

Not sure about your Aero problem, you might just want to disable it.  You can also try changing the game's launch settings, like turning on Compatibility Mode (try XP SP3), and turning off Desktop Composition and Visual Themes.

Well that saves me having to change it every time I want to play the game. I think the problem is entirely to do with Aero.

Any ideas on the filtering? I remember that I had a softer image when playing in XP.

[Momiji]

Well that saves me having to change it every time I want to play the game. I think the problem is entirely to do with Aero.

Any ideas on the filtering? I remember that I had a softer image when playing in XP.

That sucks about Aero.  =[

As for the scaling, that's generally done by your videocard and it's drivers.  It might only be on by default in the XP drivers, but have a look in your drivers' control panel for scaling settings.

[DX7.EP]

You may also want to get the latest GPU driver from NVIDIA, which should deal with most Aero problems (my desktop at home with a 9500GT handles Aero very well). But the best thing to do is to turn off Aero entirely. It wastes too much system resources IMO and tries too hard to look nice (if I want that I'll go to my Mac, thanks a lot MSFT).

As for the windowed scaling...that's weird. It affects me too, where XP looks filtered and 7 does not (though I have Intel graphics on my laptop...derp). It may be due to differences between XP's and 7's method of upscaling DirectX applications.

As for VSync patches, it works fine with AppLocale on Win7, but under Japanese locale and system language it wasn't necessary. I also installed and named those under XP, so....

I haven't dealt with Unicode problems yet, though I have seen the issue too (largely in the form of broken Korean text).

[Barrakketh]

For the filename issue, you probably have mixed character sets when it's probably expecting straight-Unicode.

It doesn't look like a filename issue.  The column with the names shows Japanese correctly, it's Windows that is fudging the tags.

Most likely the tag itself is an old ID3v1 tag which only supports ISO-8859-1 (ASCII) for character encoding.  Japanese text is screwed up, but his media player is intelligent enough to be aware of that problem and is converting the tag to Unicode.  Windows isn't.

I can't vouch for it, but Mp3Tag should be capable of fixing the tags (Action, Convert Codepage, shortcut is Alt+5).

[Emarrel]

That sucks about Aero.  =[

As for the scaling, that's generally done by your videocard and it's drivers.  It might only be on by default in the XP drivers, but have a look in your drivers' control panel for scaling settings.

Nope. I think it has more to do with how windows 7 is dealing with it.

You may also want to get the latest GPU driver from NVIDIA, which should deal with most Aero problems (my desktop at home with a 9500GT handles Aero very well). But the best thing to do is to turn off Aero entirely. It wastes too much system resources IMO and tries too hard to look nice (if I want that I'll go to my Mac, thanks a lot MSFT).

I already have the latest drivers. This problem seems to be exclusive to Touhou games, but as long as I'm able to set the executables to automatically turn Aero off while they're running, it isn't much of a problem.

As for VSync patches, it works fine with AppLocale on Win7

Including the EoSD VSync patch? That's the only one that's absolutely necessary for me.

I haven't dealt with Unicode problems yet

So your title bars are intact? It's not a big deal, but I have enough OCD for it to bother me.

It doesn't look like a filename issue.  The column with the names shows Japanese correctly, it's Windows that is fudging the tags.

Most likely the tag itself is an old ID3v1 tag which only supports ISO-8859-1 (ASCII) for character encoding.  Japanese text is screwed up, but his media player is intelligent enough to be aware of that problem and is converting the tag to Unicode.  Windows isn't.

I can't vouch for it, but Mp3Tag should be capable of fixing the tags (Action, Convert Codepage, shortcut is Alt+5).

Thanks for that info, I wasn't enjoying the thought of manually fixing thousands of tags.

[DX7.EP]

I already have the latest drivers. This problem seems to be exclusive to Touhou games, but as long as I'm able to set the executables to automatically turn Aero off while they're running, it isn't much of a problem.

Let's blame ZUN's programming then :V
I have never noticed lag or frame issues with Aero, but as for the windowed mode pixelization effect, the only comparison I know of (and is a bit of a stretch) is the Photo Viewer between XP and Vista/7 (XP filitered as zoom increased, while VIsta and 7 merely enlarged the pixels).

Including the EoSD VSync patch? That's the only one that's absolutely necessary for me.

Yes, including EoSD. I have to use it for that particular one in my Korean Win7 install. The rest of the games don't need a Japanese title and work fine without AppLocale.

So your title bars are intact? It's not a big deal, but I have enough OCD for it to bother me.

Most of them. The major exception is with any titles written in Shift-JIS (including most Touhou games), which garbles up as random Korean characters for me. As for ID3 tags, Windows does a much worse job.

[Emarrel]

Yeah, I don't know how I'm going to fix the upscaling. Either I'm just going to have to play fullscreen, or just deal with it.

Applocale also fixes the garbled unicode titlebars.

Also, all my tags are now fixed, thanks everyone.

I'm going to try looking into this 2d graphics upscaling issue. No filtering is great if you're playing an NES or SNES era game, but not for something that has true colour.