Every game you add to DxWnd gets its own profile, and every profile has a settings dialog split into tabs — Main, Video, DirectX, Timing, Input, Locale and more. Most beginners open that dialog, see a wall of options, and either change ten things at once or change nothing at all. Both are mistakes. This guide tours each tab at the level of what it is for, maps the symptom you are seeing to the tab that probably fixes it, and links out to a deep-dive for every area. If you have not added your first game yet, start with our step-by-step guide to using DxWnd; this page assumes the game is already in your list.
How DxWnd Settings Are Organised
Settings live inside each game’s profile, not in one global preferences screen. Right-click a game in the DxWnd list and choose Modify to open its dialog. That design is deliberate: the option that saves one 1998 strategy game can break a 2003 shooter, so DxWnd lets every title carry its own configuration. When you are happy with a profile, File > Save writes your whole game list and its settings to dxwnd.ini in the DxWnd folder — which is why backing up that one file preserves everything, as our guide to .dxw profiles and dxwnd.ini explains.
Two consequences follow. First, there is no “wrong” global setting to hunt down: if a game misbehaves, its own profile is where the problem lives. Second, experimentation is safe as long as you can retrace your steps — which leads to the one workflow rule that matters, covered at the end of this page.
The Main Tab: Identity, Launch and the Window Itself
The Main tab is the one tab every profile needs. It holds the path to the game’s executable, the launch parameters, and the window geometry: whether the game runs in a window at all (the well-known Run in Window option), the window’s size, and its position coordinates on the desktop. If a game ignores DxWnd completely, or opens in the wrong place at the wrong size, Main is where you look first. Our deep-dive on window size and position settings covers the geometry in full.
The Video Settings: How the Picture Is Presented
The Video area governs how the game’s image reaches your screen: frame-rate behaviour, colour-depth handling, and the presentation details that decide whether a windowed game flickers, tears or renders at the wrong speed visually. Video options are the second stop for display symptoms — black windows, flicker, garbled colours — after you have confirmed the game is hooking at all. See the DxWnd video settings explained deep-dive.
The DirectX Tab: Emulation for DirectX-Era Games
DxWnd exists largely for games built on DirectDraw and early Direct3D, and the DirectX tab holds the emulation options for that era: the compatibility behaviours that stand in for hardware and driver quirks modern Windows no longer provides. This is the tab most people should touch last, not first — the defaults are right for most titles, and the options here are for specific failures such as crashes and corrupted graphics. The DirectX settings deep-dive explains when they earn their keep.
The Timing Settings and Time Stretching
The Timing area controls the game’s sense of time, and its headline feature is Time Stretching: a multiplier applied to the clock the game reads, so a title that sprints on a modern CPU can be slowed to its designed pace — or a dragging one sped up. Timing is a symptom tab: if the game displays fine but plays at the wrong speed, you are in the right place. Our time stretching deep-dive goes further, and the troubleshooting side lives in our guide to games running too fast.
Input and Mouse Settings
Old games expect to own the mouse completely; a windowed game on a modern desktop has to share it. The Input/mouse side of the dialog manages that relationship — how the cursor is captured, clipped and translated between the window and the game. Frozen, escaping or offset cursors are diagnosed in our troubleshooting guide to DxWnd mouse problems; the settings themselves belong to the same per-profile dialog, so fixes you find there are applied here.
Locale Emulation
Locale emulation makes a game believe Windows is set to a different language and region, so text encoded for that locale decodes correctly instead of turning into gibberish. It is one of DxWnd’s documented features and the reason many people run Japanese games through it. The locale emulation deep-dive explains code pages, how this compares to system-locale tools, and its honest limits.
Hook and Compatibility Options
Behind the friendly tabs sit the hooking and compatibility behaviours: how DxWnd attaches to the game, what it intercepts, and the fallback options for titles that resist the standard approach. You rarely start here. You arrive here when a game will not hook at all — the situation our DxWnd not working checklist triages — or when a title needs the alternative proxy mode instead of the GUI hook. DxWnd also keeps status information and logs about what it hooked, which that checklist shows you how to read.
Symptom → Tab: Where to Start
| What you see | First tab | Go deeper |
|---|---|---|
| Game opens fullscreen anyway | Main (Run in Window) | Still fullscreen? Six checks |
| Window in the wrong place or size | Main (size / position) | Window size & position |
| Black window, flicker, tearing | Video | Black screen fixes |
| Rainbow or garbled colours | Video (colour depth) | 256-colour palette fix |
| Crash on launch, corrupted textures | DirectX (defaults first) | Crash-on-startup triage |
| Game plays too fast or too slow | Timing (Time Stretching) | Time stretching deep-dive |
| Cursor frozen, escaping or offset | Input / Mouse | Mouse problem fixes |
| Foreign text shows as gibberish | Locale | Locale emulation |
| Game never hooks at all | Hook / launch method | Proxy mode |
For anything that does not fit the table, the DxWnd troubleshooting hub routes every symptom we cover to its own guide.
The One Workflow Rule: Change, Test, Save
Every tab above follows the same discipline. Change one thing. Launch the game and test it. If it helped, save the profile; if it made things worse, put it back. Changing five options at once feels faster and is actually slower, because when the picture improves — or breaks — you cannot tell which option did it, and the profile becomes folklore you are afraid to touch. Small, reversible, one-at-a-time steps are how every reliable community profile was built. And when you find a combination that works, export it: a saved .dxw profile means you never have to rediscover it, and neither does anyone you share it with.
Finally, remember that the authoritative reference for your exact build ships with it: the official help manual in the help/ folder of the download documents these same settings areas, and option names can differ slightly between builds. If a label on your screen does not quite match this guide, the manual for your version wins. You can get the current build from our DxWnd download page.