OpenJazz

[LunarLoony]

#7474

Last topic for now, I promise…

Playing Jazz on modern systems is as straightforward as firing up DOSBox. It works perfectly well (although the game has a <i>serious</i> case of screen tearing that I don’t believe happens on real hardware) and is the best way to play the game.

However, there is an open-source reimplementation of the game called OpenJazz, first released in 2005. It’s not bad, but the physics don’t feel quite the same as they should. Nevertheless, if you have trouble with Jazz’s short-sightedness, this might be worth a go so you can play at higher resolutions.

Frustratingly, you can scale the game up so the sprites don’t appear teeny-tiny; but it also applies one of those stupid pixel filters which you can’t turn off.

OpenJazz on Github

[jeronimorivero]

#7478

Thanks for the info! I will give this open source version a try.

[Jozxyqk]

#7560

Screen tearing may be solved by playing around with dosbox’s refresh rate and vsync settings. Enabling vrr did the trick on my system.

Search for g-sync or freesync in the hardware specs to see if your video card and monitor support this option.

[LunarLoony]

#7620

I’ll give that a try. Thing is, I get screen tearing even playing through DOS on my Pentium II!

[firefyte]

#7644

Someone linked this on a discord:
https://github.com/deathkiller/jazz2-native

Don’t know how well this works.

[LunarLoony]

#7695

It’s a good effort, but something still feels off with the Jazz2 reimplementation. Particularly in terms of animations. I hope it goes far, though – would be nice to see Jazz 2 get a new lease of life.

[Mike]

#7713

I’ll have to check this out if it fixes how zoomed in the game is. I think it’s a huge flaw with Jazz so anything that takes care of that would be nice

EDIT: Being able to zoom out does make the game much better but is there really no way to turn off that graphics filter? Because oof, it looks really bad

[watchful]

#7714

OpenJazz had some bugs for me: could not save, load only worked from main menu, some jump pads looked like small black trees, and some missing tiles far below the level. Physics also seem a bit different, though close considering it’s not a source or reversed port.

Hard to go back to DOS engine though, view-port feels way too small.