Screen tearing in non-3D games

Saeris

So, recently I decided to play through a bunch of older games one more time, and within that set lies the Command and Conquer series. The problem is that I get some crazy-bad screen tearing while scrolling around on the map on the really old ones (Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert, Red Alert 2) which employed DirectDraw. There are three curiosities here: 1) it was my understanding that DirectDraw had vertical sync enabled by default; 2) I can't think of a reason for the developers to have used the bitflag to bypass vsync; and 3) I don't remember these games having screen tearing issues when I played them long ago (although that's easily explained by having such low FPS back then that I may have just not noticed it).

After Googling for two hours and finding almost nothing pertaining to screen tearing issues in Tiberian Dawn or Red Alert 2 (the only two I searched for), I figured it might just be a problem with my configuration. I'm on a laptop with a 2.2GHz Core2Duo, Quadro NVS 140M, 2x1GB RAM, and Windows XP SP3, and I'm playing the versions of the games from The First Decade compilation. However, as far as I know, Starcraft also uses DirectDraw and I have no tearing problems there, so I'm almost suspecting that the C&C devs really did explicitly disable vsync for their games.

Any ideas on how to mitigate or at least rationalize the screen tearing would be appreciated.

MindLib

huh...it's obvious that you need a way to disable the enabling of the automatic vsync...but how? :?

Seattle Thread

Oh jesus... if you can't figure it out then God help us all.