Sentimental Shooting Revisited

So a long time ago I posted about this game.  In case you're unfamiliar and too lazy to click the link, it's an ero-danmaku game released in the late 1990s.  I unironically enjoy it, not because of the nudity, but because of the gameplay.

In my post, I mentioned that having the music enabled causes the game to crash unless you're on Windows XP.  The reason for this is now very clear to me after having done some basic research: Microsoft has been gradually degrading the MIDI support in Windows, and XP was the last version to have proper support.

This means that you can, in fact, have the music enabled without the game crashing.  You just need to do some extra things first.

First up, if you're on Windows 8, 8.1, or 10, you'll need to install CoolSoft MIDIMapper.  Full disclosure: I'm using Windows 7, so I'm unfamiliar with actually using this.

Next, on Windows Vista or newer, you'll need to install CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth.

Now, in VirtualMIDISynth, there's some configuration that needs to be done.

1. On the MIDI Mapper tab, set VirtualMIDISynth as the default MIDI out device.
2. On the Soundfonts tab, you'll need to click the plus button and select a soundfont.  You'll need to download one of these, and thankfully, the download page for VirtualMIDISynth has links to a good number of them.  I downloaded the uncompressed version of FluidR3_GM, which so happens to be the first one in the list.
3. Do the requisite clicking of Apply and/or OK.

That's basically it.  Now you can start Sentimental Shooting and enable the music.  The crashing should be completely gone.  If it doesn't work and you're on Windows 8, 8.1, or 10, try changing the default MIDI out device within MIDIMapper instead of in VirtualMIDISynth.  Unfortunately, I don't have a computer running one of these versions of Windows to test on.

However, enable the music cautiously, as the default volume was extremely loud for me.  I had to crank it down to around 30% for it to not be louder than the game's sound effects.  You can get back into VirtualMIDISynth's configuration using the system tray icon.  From there, double-click on the soundfont you installed and the volume setting will be on the dialog box that appears.

Additionally, there's something I did that you may want to do.  VirtualMIDISynth has two global keyboard shortcuts enabled by default, and I was worried about them clashing with other games.  On the Shortcuts tab, just click in each key combination's text box and press Spacebar, that seems to have disabled them for me.

Edit (2020-11-11): There's now a better solution for fixing the color palette corruption.  You should follow that post instead and ignore the suggested compatibility settings here.

There's still one remaining issue with the game, and to address that I need to contradict my earlier post.  Specifically, the part where I said:

That's it, no compatibility modes, no running as administrator, and no extra settings.

Without any compatibility options set on the game's executable (SGSTG.EXE), some of the game's graphics palettes are corrupted.  The only combination of them that seemed to fix the corruption for me was the following:

• Run in 256 colors
• Run in 640x480 screen resolution
• Disable desktop composition
• Disable display scaling on high DPI settings

The last two make sense, sort of, but the first two seem redundant to me: the game already runs in 640x480 with 256 colors.  Nevertheless, the palette corruption wasn't fixed for me without both of them checked.  There are still two scenarios where the palette corruption will happen, and your only recourse to fix it is to restart the game: If you sit at the title screen long enough that one of the demos starts playing, or if you Alt + Tab out of the game and return to it later.

If you're unsure what the palette corruption looks like, well, the logo when you first start up the game isn't supposed to be red, or color-fringed.  Also there's an enemy that sometimes appears outlined in white instead of black.  Those are the only two instances of palette corruption I've noticed, at the very least.

I've been tinkering with the game's graphics files and may be able to provide patched files that don't experience the corruption, we'll have to see.  More on this as events warrant.