I think I solved the movie crash issue

As you may be aware of there is a movie crash problem with Swat 3 for some people. I think I know how to fix it.

Recently I had a problem with a new laptop that wouldn't even do 800x600 resolution. I had to manually add it to the list of approved resolutions for it to work. This got me wondering about the movies. The Swat 3 movies play in 640x480 and since it isn't in my list of approved resolutions on the laptop I tested to see what would happen. I got the infamous DDERR_GENERIC error.

In other words I think some people are having such much trouble with the movies because their modern systems can't even do 640x480 resolution any more.

I wonder if I re-encoded the movies to 800x600, hack the game executable to the new resolution, and used a movie codec that was more Windows 10 friendly if that would solve everyone's problems?

Anyone who is willing to test this theory feel free to work on it. I am a little busy now with real life work. The locations to hack are in a sticky thread in this subforum. I would recommend just trying to do the "sierra.avi" and "swat_intro.avi" videos for now because it will tell us if the theory is correct (Swat 3 crashes immediately because of these movies).

I got a confirmation about this possible fix from another user on GOG.com.

I re-encoded the movies to 800x600 but now I have to hack the game executable before testing.

Hmmm, it didn't work. The game crashes instead of displaying the new movies even on a machine that had no problems with the movies.

Either I did something wrong or the information about where to hack the movies in the executable is wrong. I did the original movie tests so long ago I don't remember specifics. Argggh.

Perhaps the game doesn't like the new encoding I did on the movies even thought Windows plays them fine.

UPDATE: It looks like I was correct. The game only will play certain formats. When I went back to XVID it worked but didn't seem to like the H264. The problem also could be the audio format.

UPDATE2: MPEG 4 and AAC audio seemed to work fine but my hex edit locations of the movies appear to be wrong. Not sure how I could be so wrong with my old information. More testing required.

Got it working! Just need to do the final test on my laptop.

My notes were wrong but I did find the one call for the movies through trial and error hex editing. I really wish I knew how to use a disassembler better to reverse engineer more efficiently. This is comparable to using a sledge hammer to kill a fly.