Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

If you use a 16:9 monitor this enables you to play jj2+ in 16:9 without stretching anything, so Jazz won’t look as fat and the tiles will be square instead of using 800×600 stretched or with black borders… You have to select 800×450 in the jj2+ drop-down window menu under ‘video’ (after pressing alt+enter to get the menu) or you can select it in the game menu (options -> video).

In the cncddrawconfig.exe you can choose some things, I already set it to the best settings mostly but you have a choice between basically 2 renderers: Direct3D9 or OpenGL, for the lowest latency on Windows use Direct3D9, Lanczos looks best. But if you want it to look better choose OpenGL (OpenGL also works better on other OS’s). I only added 3 shaders because they look best from my experience. Use xBR lvl1 for the lowest latency OpenGL shader but lvl 3 looks best. Lvl 2 is in-between these. If you don’t change anything in the cncddrawconfig.exe it’s set it to OpenGL xBR lvl2. I also added xBR lvl1 and lvl2 noblend and some basic shaders like nearest neighbor.glsl and lanczos.glsl; they look worse but for an old pc they might be the only ones that run fast enough on some PC’s. Or maybe you wanna choose the 3rd renderer (GDI) if you have a really old pc, up to you to decide.

I set ‘limit game speed’ to ‘no limit’ and disabled ‘limit fps’ to let jj2+ handle this itself. You can set the maxfps in game’s plus.ini if you want.

I also added accuratetimers=true because I asked chatgpt and google gemini if I could improve the ddraw.ini and they said: “accuratetimers=true ensures that Jazz Jackrabbit 2+ maintains consistent game logic at its native 70-tick speed. On modern CPUs, the game’s timing can fluctuate due to faster processors and multitasking, which can cause the game to “speed up” or experience micro-stutters. Enabling accurate timers forces the game to rely on precise frame timing, ensuring stable physics, animation, and input responsiveness, just like it would on the original hardware.” I tested it with this setting and the game runs fine with it so I kept it. If you have older hardware this setting might not be for you though, if you notice any issues try removing that line from the ddraw.ini or setting it to false.

It was quite some tweaking to get it just right, I also tweaked the shader file (I customized xBR lvl2 to get xbr lvl1, a slightly lighter version, with the help of chatgpt). So I thought why not share it here including the tweaks, so someone else that plays this game doesn’t have to tweak it. Some settings didn’t make any difference so I just kept them on the default setting, no need to change them although it might be different for other hardware. But I used these settings for multiple windows pc’s (5 at least) and it worked on all of them.

IMPORTANT (I already mentioned this but just to be clear): if you want the window options (the drop-down menu’s) like we normally have in jj2 you have to press ALT+ENTER, and you can switch back to full-screen using that as well. Sometimes switching back gives a little white border (for me at least), then I just press the windows key and go back to jj2+ afterwards and it’s perfect again. And you can access the chatlogger with alt+tab after pressing ALT+ENTER. If you don’t use alt+enter first it won’t open the chatlogger if you click it but it will go to the game automatically. It’s a bit weird in combination with the chatlogger so if you are scripting and need it a lot, or if you use it for chatting a lot; consider just disabling the cncddrawconfig.exe temporarily by just putting the 3 files (cncddrawconfig.exe, ddraw.ini and ddraw.dll) in a zip and removing them from your jj2 folder, that way they are disabled and you can easily put it back again later.

I don’t include many shaders (only the most standard and best ones) because it’s so much tweaking. I wanna keep this simple and it’s not needed for this game. If you wanna have more shaders you can download them from the link I included in the credits.

I also added some screenshots so you can see if you like it. They’re compressed though, because the file size was too big. So just try it for yourself if you wanna see the full quality… If you don’t like it; just delete it again, I personally like it a lot.

If you have something to add; feel free to leave some feedback in the review section.

Extra options if you want (more complex but it works):

In the cncddrawconfig.exe I set it to ‘presentation: fullscreen’ for the 1600×900 upscale, because the input latency is a bit lower that way and it’s more true to the pixelart when the resolution is just doubled from 800×450. But if you want it upscaled to your monitor’s resolution select ‘presentation: fullscreen upscaled’ instead…

You can also use this to upscale 800×600 to whatever your screen’s resolution is and add your favorite shader to get the most out of it. Inside cncddrawconfig.exe just change presentation to fullscreen upscaled. If you want it stretched to your screen uncheck ‘maintain aspect ratio’ and if you have a 16:9 screen but want the game to be 4:3 with black borders check ‘maintain aspect ratio’. Just make sure your video driver settings aren’t overriding these scaling settings though.

Or you can play 800×600 upscaled to 1600×1200. Just add width=1600 height=1200 to the ddraw.ini (it’s now set to 0 which defaults to the game’s request which doesn’t always give you the upscaled version). If that doesn’t work try “jazz.exe -> properties -> compatibility -> change high dpi settings -> check ‘Override high DPI scaling behavior’ -> Scaling performed by: Application” and also for the cncddrawconfig.exe if that wasn’t enough. This way you can keep presentation to fullscreen and it will be integer scaling to have less input delay and it will be more true to the pixelart than upscaling to 1080p or 1440p. Also, for jj2+ an aspect ratio of 4:3 might be better than 16:9, but that’s up to you to decide… The maintain aspect ratio setting doesn’t work with fullscreen though so you have to play with black borders in the case your monitor is 16:9 and you play with 1600×1200. If you wanna have true 1600×1200 with black borders on all sides of the game you have to put fullscreen=true and boxed=true in the ddraw.ini as well, that way it’s true integer scaling instead of just 1600×1200 as big as possible on your screen without changing the aspect ratio. If you wanna have 800×600 stretched to 16:9 just use ‘fullscreen upscaled’ instead with slightly more input delay by lack of integer scaling or select fullscreen but add your monitor’s resolution to the ddraw.ini as width and height, it still won’t be integer scaling so it probably still has more input delay than 1600×1200 but it’s up to you what you prefer.

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https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw (see MIT License in Description) + Djazz for letting me know it excists