Transporte

DxWnd rel. 2.01.99 unfinished Manual

What is DxWnd?
DxWnd is a Win32 hooker that intercepts the window creation event for the configured tasks and alter the behaviour of several system call (from user32.dll, GDI32.dll and the DirectX libraries) in order to get a proper behaviour of fullscreen programs, but in a windowed environment..... too complicated? Well, actually DxWnd is a tool thatdoes its best to let you run fullscreen applications in a window.

Why DxWnd?
This is not a silly question. Actually, you may think to two different questions: 1) Why should I use DxWnd? 2) Why someone should spend his time to develop it? Why should I use DxWnd? Let's start with the first one. Once upon a time (in the IT clock, that means a few years ago) people used to have clumsy PCs that in aslow and single-threaded environment tried to do their best to impress their owner with strength demonstrations, usually trying to move colored pixels on the screen in the fastest possible way. That custom was named videogaming, and implied using all tricky ways to improve the system performances. One common way to do that, was to highjack all hardware resources and dedicate them for this singlepurpose, of course disabling any attempt to run parallel tasks in other portions of the screen: the classic example being any videogame developed for Win95 and further. Now, you guys may ask yourselves why should all this time be passed away and PC increased their power by a 100x times more, to keep playing the very same game in the very same environment. Someone is calling you on a chat? A newemail message is arrived? You want to browse the net meanwhile? Something is happening on your favourite social network or MMPORPG? Forget about it! You're currently dealing with a task that wants 100% of your attention, even if it uses 1% of your PC power. So, why not attempting to push this old and invasive application within a window of its own ? That's what DxWnd is for: let fullscreenapplications run pretending they're still in a fullscreen context, but actually within their own separate window. And, taking advantage of the code hooking needed to do so, in some case it may even happen that things are further improved, but we'll see this later. Why someone should spend his time to develop it? Now the second question: why someone should ever bother to develop a thing like this? This isdifferent story. I started looking for a window-izer for a specific purpose: not having a dual monitor PC at home, I was looking for a way to debug fullscreen videogames. Looking in the net resources, I got references to an asian (japanese?) DxWnd project that seemed discontinued, but left an old copy of the C++ sources (unfortunately, not the most recent release) to be downloaded. After that, therewere several attempts to translate and improve the program, but none shared the sources again. When I opened the project trying to understand the basic principle, I found that it was incredibly simple and yet sophisticated, acting I think in a very close way as virus or anti-virus programs do. So I just thought it was such a pity that this incredible piece of artwork of C++ programming could beleft discontinued, and then I decided to “adopt” the project and continue it, even if in the meanwhile I bought a second monitor for my domestic PC. And for the same reason, I published the source code on sourceforge, a proper location for any open source piece of coding, and I encourage anyone to join the project and extend it further on. And let me thank again the mysterious coder whose onlytrail left to make a reference is SFB7: whoever you are, SFB7 (if this was your nick), thank you.

How does DxWnd work?
Well, actually there are several different ways you may write a fullscreen application, and that's why there are corresponding different ways to handle it hence some annoying configuration to do before. Please, bear in mind that DxWnd is still an experimental program, and then...