Requiem Modern

Requiem Modern

A launcher and set of fixes that make Requiem: Avenging Angel (1999, Cyclone Studios / 3DO; GOG version 1.2) run properly on Windows 10/11: any resolution and frame rate, widescreen, menus at full resolution, borderless alt-tab, EAX audio through DSOAL, the game's own options and key bindings in the launcher, and F10 to change them while playing. Optional HD art (AI-upscaled textures, HUD icons and menu art) is made by the launcher on your own PC, from your own copy of the game.

Download: see Releases: one zip with the launcher. It carries none of the game's art: MAKE HD ART (main menu) upscales your own game's textures, HUD icons and menu art on your PC with the bundled Real-ESRGAN (needs a Vulkan graphics card; without one the textures are enlarged smoothly instead). Player documentation: the README inside the zip.

This repository holds the source only. It contains no game files: the launcher reads and patches the player's own copy of the game, and everything it replaces is backed up and can be restored.

How it works

Part	What it does
launcher/requiem_modern.py	The launcher / installer (Tkinter). Installs DDrawCompat and DSOAL, writes their settings, rebuilds D3D.exe from the original with mod/patch_d3d.py, installs the HD art, edits the game's options file, and stays in the background while the game runs for F10.
launcher/game_cfg.py	Reads and writes the game's own options file Gamers\latest.cfg (flags, volumes, brightness, the 256-entry key table).
mod/patch_d3d.py	Byte patches and code caves for the GOG v1.2 D3D.exe: renderer and DirectInput crash fixes, widescreen camera, HUD scale, frame-rate independent physics and creature AI, HD texture and HUD support, 128 MB game memory, loading RequiemMenu.dll. Every patch checks the original bytes first.
menu/rqmenu.c	RequiemMenu.dll: draws the 2D front end (DirectDraw, 640x480, 8-bit) at the game resolution by scaling every draw call; maps the mouse; borderless alt-tab; F10 and live settings (shared memory, applied on the game's thread).
mod/art_build.py, mod/blast.py	The texture archive format (PKWARE DCL implode); blast.py is a Python port of zlib's blast.c.
mod/menu_hd.py, mod/hud_hd.py	HD menu art and HUD icons: upscale, back to the original palette and colour key, RQHD header with the original size.
mod/hd_make.py	MAKE HD ART: the whole HD pipeline, run by the launcher on the player's PC (textures, skins' animation frames, effects, HUD, menu masters) from their original files.
mod/tex_extract.py, mod/hd_rest.py, mod/hd_build.py	The texture formats: extract, animation frames, rebuild in the game's own formats with the RQHD marker. (tex_upscale.py, hd_pack.py: the original development-time tools.)
launcher/realesrgan	realesrgan-ncnn-vulkan and the x4plus model, bundled for MAKE HD ART (licences in LICENSES.txt there).
docs/DEVLOG.md	The full reverse-engineering and test log: every address, every fix, what was tried and how it was verified.

Building

Requirements: Windows, Python 3.12+ with pyinstaller, pillow and pefile; ziglang (py -m pip install ziglang) for the DLL.

menu\build.bat            :: RequiemMenu.dll (32-bit, zig cc)
launcher\build.bat        :: launcher\dist\Requiem Modern.exe

No game art is in this repository or in the release: the launcher makes it on the player's PC (mod/hd_make.py). docs/DEVLOG.md has the details of every step.

Antivirus warnings

Requiem Modern.exe is an unsigned PyInstaller one-file program, and a game mod necessarily does things some antivirus heuristics associate with malware: it patches the game's exe, its DLL hooks Windows window functions inside the game process, it watches the F10 key (only while the game window has the focus) and it shares a block of memory with the game for the live settings. Some scanners flag such files by mistake. Everything it does is in this repository's source; you can build the exe yourself (see Building).

Credits

• DDrawCompat by narzoul (0BSD), bundled in launcher/ddrawcompat.
• DSOAL (LGPL 2.1) and OpenAL Soft (LGPL) by kcat, bundled in launcher/dsoal (DSOAL r697; licences and version alongside).
• blast.c by Mark Adler (zlib licence), ported in mod/blast.py.
• Real-ESRGAN by Xintao Wang et al. (BSD-3-Clause) and realesrgan-ncnn-vulkan (MIT, on ncnn by Tencent, BSD-3-Clause), bundled in launcher/realesrgan for MAKE HD ART.
• Requiem: Avenging Angel (c) 1999 The 3DO Company / Cyclone Studios.

How it was made: reverse-engineered and written by Claude (Anthropic's AI model, Claude Opus, in Claude Code), directed and play-tested by the repository owner. Each fix was verified in the running game; the log is in docs/DEVLOG.md.

License

MIT for the Requiem Modern code (LICENSE). Bundled third-party parts keep their own licences (LICENSES/, launcher/dsoal/, launcher/realesrgan/).