The Dink Network

Whenever I try to run Dink (1.07, 1.08 or FreeDink) on my Windows 7 Professional (32-bit) box, the mouse pointer on the title screen drifts up and left. It's difficult, but you can fight it enough to press the start button, but in the actual game, Dink moves up and left and all you can do is stop him in place. Playing is impossible.

To get around this, I've been playing Dink 1.08 on my very crappy old XP laptop, but due to that laptop's extreme crappiness, I encounter bizarre bugs during DMODs (graphics replaced by garbage, Dink getting stuck on a movement command for a few seconds). I'd much prefer to be able to play them on my Windows 7 PC. Dink HD does not have this problem, but it does have many crashing problems with DMODs that keep it from really being a complete solution.

I searched the forum, but all I found regarding Dink and Win 7 was problems with UAC and not having permissions to do stuff in Program Files (I already fixed this by assigning myself Full Control to the Dink folder). Has anybody encountered this forced movement problem or have any clue how to fix it? I would be very appreciative, as this would make my DMOD-playing project a lot smoother.

Incidentally, I have tried running the game in "Windows XP Mode" (Microsoft's Virtual PC virtualization program running XP), and that only made things worse. Hell, I even tried running in a virtualized box that had Windows 98 installed on it - no dice. Help?

EDIT: Okay, I just realized that I had not actually pointed DFArc 3 to freedink.exe when I thought I had. FreeDink is actually free of this problem, only v1.07 and v1.08/aural+ have it. Thanks a bunch, GNU FreeDink project, for your excellent support of "woe."

This is no longer a really urgent problem for me, but it is still a weird problem with Windows 7 and the main Dink 1.07/8, so if anybody can shed light on it, that'd be nice.

This doesn't sound like an OS related issue. Start the game and when the mouse drifting starts, unplug all USB or PS/2 devices. This is to check if mouse or keyboard is the culprit. Update mouse, keyboard drivers and run Windows Update.

Yeah mon, Freedink is so much better than the official Dink. My next DMOD have FreeDink requirement.

My next DMOD have FreeDink requirement.

Can it play MP3?/Ogg If not, it's useless to me.

The thing with Freedink is that it loads music files faster in-game. With the original 1.08, it needs about half a second to a second to load and then play them.

Doesn't Aural+ fix that for you? Or are you talking about mp3s?

Midi's don't take noticeable time to load in Aural+ for me.

Aural+ also fixes that, yes.

Huh, it does.

Actually, I'm having problems with music and sounds in FreeDink on Windows 7. Both of them pop and sound badly distorted if I'm running much of anything else on my machine at the same time. This is becoming a big problem for me and making it difficult to play.

I'm pretty sure if you contact Beuc about it he can try to help you out with that

That sort of thing usually only happens on slow old computers (<1ghz cpu) or sound cards. You may want to upgrade your sound chip drivers, or alternately just untick the sound box in dfarc and enjoy the silence.