Investigations into DDERR_GENERIC error

I was able finally to investigate a computer with the dreaded DDERR_GENERIC error caused by the original Swat 3 movies.

For some reason this error started to pop up on my main computer that I game with.   For years I had no problem running Swat 3 with the original movies in place.   I am not sure when the change occurred because normally I test the game on my GOG version install of Swat 3 (I replaced the original movies with re-encoded version long ago) .   The Steam version is a copy that I don't run as often and normally worked the same but with the original movies still intact.  

Below is the Windows Event Viewer report of the error:




After I got this error I created a vb .net program to capture the resolution that Swat 3 tries to run during the startup process. Here were the results:

1) If the DDERR_GENERIC error is triggered my app didn't log any resolution changes.  Obviously my app is only able to capture successfully completed resolution changes.

2) If I swapped out the original "sierra.avi" movie for a re-encoded XVID version the game would first switch to a 640x480 resolution for a few milliseconds before going back to 1920x1080 (my desktop resolution).  It would then switch back to 640x480 while it played the movie and then change to the Swat 3 main menu resolution (default is 800x600) once the movie was done.

3) If I used the "no intro" flag the game would behave the same as mentioned above in #2 except it would do a quick test of a 800x600 resolution window instead of 640x480.  800x600 of course is the default Swat 3 main menu resolution.

The conclusion is that if we upgrade the movies to 800x600 the game will stop testing for 640x480 and possibly solve another problem that I suspect some people have (ie. not being able to use 640x480).