### Taking Logs

Preface:

Though DxWnd is developed trying to make its use as easy and reliable as possible, in reality, the variety of platforms, game engines, game releases and configurations make each case a real challenge and it will happen quite often that things won't be right at the first attempt. Because of the complexity of this task, the help provided by the log files is really precious, and even though they might be really obscure for most DxWnd users, they can be grabbed and posted to the DxWnd forum to get some help. The following explains how to do that:

Setting up the tool:

DxWnd logs can be activated from the DxWnd interface in Expert mode. So, if not already done, click on Options > Expert mode.

Then, the program configuration will show the "Logs" tab where the flags for logging options can be set. In most cases, the optimal configuration will be the one shown here:

Log production:

The logs are written in the "dxwnd.log" file located in the game folder (if that folder is writable; when not possible, the "dxwnd.log" file will be written elsewhere) while the game is running. So, once configured, run the game and look for the "dxwnd.log" file.

Since logs could be very verbose and write huge quantity of text, it is advisable to run the game for as little time as possible, interrupting the game session as soon as the problem occurs. Then, the log size can be reduced by file compression: the log is quite repetitive and the compression rate is usually very high. Please, do not add more flags if not asked: that would easily generate more useless text making it more difficult to read and understand.

Special cases:

When hunting an occasional bug it may be inconvenient to get huge logs during the long time it takes until the problem occurs. In this situation, it is possible to write the logs in a "circular" mode: in this case, two log files will be created and periodically swapped and overwritten, so that their size is trimmed to the maximum value. In this case, it is necessary to collect and send both the log files (named "dxwnd.log" and "dxwnd.0.log").

If there are problems with the CD-DA emulation, it is usually useless to grab information about exclusively the audio operations. In this case, you should set only the "System" and "Sound" flags.