I usually play Starcraft in windowed mode, but when I play my mods, I have to play it in full screen. However, the color gets messed up no matter what I try when it's in full screen, so is it possible to play the mods in windowed mode?

AFAIK, there's no (simple) way to play mods in windowed mode.

I don't know how chaos launcher works, but afaik it loads starcraft from your existing starcraft folder. So, maybe, you could replace the starcraft.exe with your mod, or the mpqs?

It says that the game does not use MPQs and then it closes when I try that. Is there some sort of plugin that I could add to my mod that makes it run in windowed mode?

You should try getting into contact with the developer of the W-MODE[?] plug-in for Chaos Launcher and ask if he can do anything about releasing an MPQDraft plug-in version of his mod or something.

I'm curious if anyone was able to get this working/contact the author/make a plugin. I would like to run some of my ancient mods in windowed (to avoid crashing) for making demonstrational video, but I was unsuccessful in getting Chaoslauncher to work with any mods.

You could download a copy of linux and run SC via wine on it. Then it's hard to get it in fullscreen but easy to have it windowed ;0

Having seen this before, I would have been able to answer... I used to run my mods in window mode, but I can't remember how I used to do it...

I believe I was replacing files somewhere? It involved making W-Mode start the mod as if it was Starcraft.exe

What is your "colour screwed up" problem? Is it because you're running Vista / W7? There's a registry fix for this, if that's the case. The colours in b.net can screw up and not be fixed, and within the game they will sometimes flicker to being screwed up, but will be immediately corrected.

I asked MasterOfChaos about a way to do this, and this is what he said:

Quote from MasterOfChaos

I don't think that this is a problem with w-mode. You just need to inject its dll into starcraft before the window is created. Depending on the injection time you need to change a setting in the wmode.ini. No idea if the launcher you use for modding supports dll loading.
If you don't connect to battle.net you can also use InfectInject to patch starcraft to load w-mode. You can play on iccup and LAN with such a patched SC, but not on bnet.

I have no clue what that means though.

Quote from Lanthanide

What is your "colour screwed up" problem? Is it because you're running Vista / W7? There's a registry fix for this, if that's the case. The colours in b.net can screw up and not be fixed, and within the game they will sometimes flicker to being screwed up, but will be immediately corrected.

I'd like to have a plug-in for this now because I have a widescreen monitor (as do most people nowadays), and playing SC is widescreen is disgusting.

My widescreen monitor automatically blocks it to 4:3. Most of them do, particularly any released in the last couple of years (mine is from 2007). Fiddle around with the on-screen display and see what options it has. Laptops are likely to be more limited, though.

Hmmm, I understand (mostly) what MOC is saying. I haven't heard of InfectInject before, I'll have to look it up.

I don't have the source files (like .pat/.mem files) for some of these old projects so hopefully just injecting/patching works and I don't need to rebuild the mod exes.

Just to report - I recorded some of my mod recordings I needed, in fullscreen, on windows 7. In lieu of a supposed hotfix that I grabbed that fixes starcraft, I decided to try it and see what happened. I did not crash during an hour+ of recordings. Not really the best sample to base it off of, but I crashed 15 minutes into AO's demo recording and about 15-20 minutes into the BWAI demonstration I did a while before that as well.

If you were pursuing a windowed mechanism to avoid the windows 7 crash I recommend you update and see if it still crashes. People on TL are reporting it helps them as well.

It doesn't fix funky colors, though. Unfortunately, fraps doesn't pick those up so I cant' show you how badly some of my old mods have their menus mangled. It's only the menus though.

I'm not sure if you still need this, but I had a sudden flash in my head, I know what I used to do. (Weird because I wasn't thinking about this thread and I wasn't even thinking about anything related to this...)

Backup your original starcraft mpq and replace them with the mod's mpq (You may need to merge the files that are inside of the mod's mpqs with the content of the mod in order to have all the files for starcraft to work.)

Doing that, the mod becomes your normal starcraft and W-Mode will start it just fine.

Note: If the mod is an exe, you can still browse the files inside it using your mpq editor.

Related to this, other than doing what apos suggested, is there any way to run a resolution expander with a mod?

Quote from Jack[RCDF

Related to this, other than doing what apos suggested, is there any way to run a resolution expander with a mod?

I know that you said other than what I said, but basically, all you need is complete mpqs for each mod and then, you can quickly switch if you want to play a mod or not. (Keep separate folders for each mod and then, you can just copy and overwrite then ones that are in the starcraft folder. Of course, everything is backed up...) Once you have prepared your mpqs for each mod, you don't need to do the dirty work again.

Unfortunately if you wanted to distribute a mod that automatically used windowed mode or a res expander, you'd then need to distribute the whole MPQ. Also, how would that work for firegrafted mods?

How about an MPQDraft plugin that loads Chaoslauncher (BWL) plugins, or even standard DLLs?

Standard DLLs can easily be made into a MPQDraft plugin, you can check how BWAPI does it. Simply use LoadLibrary( <dllPathHere> ).

If you want to make a custom W-Mode from scratch, BWAPI also has source code for that(including switching between Fullscreen and Windowed using ALT+Enter, window resizing/stretching, and some other things), but it does not support Battle.net.

Until you find a better solution I post here something that might help.

W-MODE originally came as an xmod plugin for scloader2b that is a totally starcraft version independent nocd, dll/xmod injector, and mpq loader: http://winner.cspsx.de/Starcraft/Tool/scloader2b_wmode_102.zip
That time scloader2b wasn't too popular because nocd loading was a taboo (today blizzard gives you nocd, so this shouldnt be a problem), and another fact is that a lot of ppl don't like stupid commandline progs, and scloader2b has no graphical frontend. So, if you like only programs that come with shiny user interfaces then please ignore this post.

Unpack the scloader2b_wmode_102.zip to your starcraft folder (any sc/bw version will do because scloader2b is a nocd for any sc version) and run sc with the following command:
scloader2b -xmod wmode.xmod -mpq mymod.mpq
This will load starcraft in window mode, with your mpq file if this is what you needed. You can also load dll patches with scloader2b, and multiple mpq files if you specify more than one -mpq parameters:
scloader2b -xmod wmode.xmod -mpq mymod1.mpq -mpq mymod2.mpq
This way mymod1.mpq has higher priority than mymod2.mpq (defined by the order on the commandline). Of course all scloader2b loaded mpqs have higher priority than any of the mpq files of starcraft (even higher than patch_rt.mpq).
scloader2b -xmod wmode.xmod -mpq mymod.mpq -dll mymod.dll
This command loads windowed mode, a mod mpq file, and an injectable dll. The injectable dll doesn't need to have a defined interface, it has to do its job from the DllMain().
For more info on scloader2b type in the following command:
scloader2b -?

Some other parameters that scloader2b accepts but aren't in the readme txt of the prog:
scloader2b -xmod wmode.xmod -allowmultiple
You can start more than one starcraft instances with -allowmultiple.
Besides the -dll and -xmod parameters you can use -dllhide and -dllex, but I wont describe these here cause you don't need them.

What about firegraft .exe mods? Will it let you run those in windowed mode too?