Win7 patcher for GM2024.11+

GameMaker 2024.11 runtime formally removed support for running games on Windows 7.

As of 2024.11.0.227, the only part of the runtime that's actually incompatible with Windows 7 is the MFCreateDXGIDeviceManager call, which is used for high[er]-performance video playback.

That's why you get an error message reading

The procedure entry point MFCreateDXGIDeviceManager could not be located in the dynamic link library MFPlat.dll

when trying to run GM games compiled with these runtime versions on Windows 7.

This tool patches game executables so that they can run on Windows 7.

The tool replaces a reference to the MFCreateDXGIDeviceManager function by a reference to MFTGetInfo, which does exist in the Windows 7 version of MFPlat.dll

GameMaker calls MFCreateDXGIDeviceManager with the first argument set to 0 so calling MFTGetInfo instead gracefully fails without crashing the game.

Removing the function used for video playback means that the video_ functions will no longer work.

This is not the only reason why video playback can fail so games are supposed to handle these things relatively gracefully.

You can download this web page and it'll work offline, but if you'd like to integrate the tool in your build process, you can grab the binaries from itch.io.

Source code is available on GitHub.

GameMaker could use LoadLibrary + GetProcAddress to load this one function dynamically and thus only have the video playback fail to work on Windows 7, not the whole game.

Whether it's practical for them to do depends on whether they intend to make use of any other functions that don't exist in Windows 7 DLLs.

It might if the game fails with this same error and because of this one function too, but I wouldn't get my hopes too high.