Disciples: Sacred Lands (1999, Strategy First) is the dark-fantasy turn-based strategy game that built its reputation on hand-painted artwork, RPG-style unit progression and four warring factions. The copy most players own today is the Gold edition sold on GOG — and that specific edition has a specific DxWnd problem, diagnosed by DxWnd’s developer ghotik himself in the project’s forum: GOG’s own wrapper and DxWnd end up hooking the same Windows call, and the game dies in the collision. This guide walks through his fix, plus the palette and flicker issues other players documented in the same forum.
Why the GOG version resists windowing
Sacred Lands renders most of its interface through GDI rather than a modern graphics API, which already makes it an unusual hooking target. The GOG release adds a twist: GOG ships older games with its own compatibility wrapper so they run on current Windows. In the forum thread, ghotik traced a startup failure to both wrappers — GOG’s and DxWnd’s — intercepting the FreeLibrary call, each one re-entering the other until the process ran out of stack and crashed. It is not a flaw in your install; it is two compatibility layers fighting, and DxWnd grew a dedicated option to step aside.
The fix: Skip FreeLibrary recursion
- Add the game to DxWnd the standard way (see how to use DxWnd), pointing the profile at the Sacred Lands executable in your GOG install folder.
- Open the profile’s Compat. tab and, in the GOG group, enable Skip FreeLibrary recursion. In older DxWnd builds the same option lived on the Compat. tab under the name Fix FreeLibrary — it is one and the same setting. Ghotik notes this flag is needed even for the game’s demo, so treat it as mandatory, not as a tweak to try later.
- Launch the game from DxWnd. With the recursion skipped, the double-hooking disappears and the game starts inside the DxWnd window.
Short on patience? Ghotik also posted a ready-made export for this game in the forum thread: download the .dxw file, bring it in with File → Import, and correct the install path. How importing works is covered in how DxWnd profiles work. A second forum thread reports the same export working on a Steam copy of Sacred Lands, not just the GOG one — the FreeLibrary clash is a DxWnd-side behaviour, and the flag helps wherever the game came from.
Which copy do you have? The flag matters either way
Three versions of Sacred Lands circulate: the original CD release, the GOG Gold edition, and the Steam release. The FreeLibrary recursion was diagnosed on the GOG build, because GOG’s wrapper is the second hooker in the chain — but the correction lives in DxWnd, and ghotik was explicit that the flag is required even for the game’s demo. In practice: whatever your source, if Sacred Lands dies at startup under DxWnd, set the flag before you try anything else. The GOG launcher contributes one more quirk worth knowing — it also pins the game to a single CPU core as part of its own compatibility treatment — so if performance feels odd after the crash is fixed, you are seeing layers of compatibility tooling interact, not a single program misbehaving. Simplify where you can: one wrapper doing one job each.
Colours and the black-box flicker
Two visual complaints show up in the threads, with different answers. If the game’s palette breaks — shifted or psychedelic colours — first make sure you are on a current build: a palette regression that affected this game was fixed during the v2.06.12 development cycle, so an old DxWnd is the most likely culprit; wrong colours in DxWnd covers the remaining palette options if it persists. The other report is a black rectangle flickering over the screen during play. Players in the thread reduced it with the “Palette update don’t Blit” option, and the community suggestions documented there, in the order the thread works through them, are:
- Change the renderer away from the D3D9 option — try the primary surface renderer instead.
- Experiment with the surface handling on the DirectX settings — the Full-Flip emulation mode is the one named in the thread.
- Enable Force windowing on the Main tab, so the game cannot renegotiate a fullscreen mode mid-session.
- Keep “Palette update don’t Blit” on while you test the others, since it was the change that reduced the flicker in the original report.
None of these is presented in the thread as a guaranteed cure — they are the documented experiments, they interact with each other, and which combination helps varies by machine. Change one thing at a time and note what you changed; with a GDI-drawn game like this, methodical testing beats random flag-flipping.
Known issues
Because Sacred Lands draws through GDI, some DxWnd features designed around DirectDraw surfaces behave differently here, and the flicker above can be reduced rather than always eliminated. Expect to spend a few minutes in the profile rather than zero. One corollary of the diagnosis: since the recursion needs two hooking layers to happen, an original CD install — which carries no GOG wrapper — may never meet the crash at all, and for that copy the plain profile can be enough; the flag exists for the wrapped releases. The upside, whichever edition you own, is that the blocking problem — the game refusing to run windowed at all — has a definite, developer-supplied answer rather than a folklore workaround.
Where to get Disciples: Sacred Lands legally
The game is sold today as Disciples: Sacred Lands Gold on GOG — the edition this guide’s main fix was written for — and it is also available on Steam. (That is an ordinary store link; this site may earn a commission on purchases in future, as explained in our disclaimer.)
More game-specific setups live on the DxWnd games hub. Sources: the DxWnd forum threads “Disciples Gold GOG version won’t go into window mode” and “Disciples: Sacred Land — Windowed?”, the flicker thread, and the v2.06.12 release notes, all on SourceForge.