The Banishing of Tim Cain (from Fallout 2)

Made an account just to find help here. I'm running into a major problem trying to run Fallout 2 without Tim Cain's mug on my taskbar.

I got both Fallout and Fallout 2 on GOG, and immediately I could not stand Tim Cain staring at me with his dead pixel eyes. A couple weeks ago I looked through this very forum and found a way to fix that for Fallout using Resource Hacker to change the icon for the exe, and then I went about my business playing Fallout from beginning to end. Now that I'm about to embark on Fallout 2, I want to change its icon as well.

Problem is, if I change the icon, the game simply refuses to run!

Whenever I try, I get an error reading:

"You're trying to use sfall with an incompatible version of fallout
Was expecting 'Fallout 2 v1.02 US'

fallout2.exe was an unexpected size. Expected 0x122800 but got 0x13d000"

I've fiddled around with the files, and for some reason deleting ddraw.dll and ddraw.ini allows the game to run. But the game's main screen (above the menus and buttons and such) is absolutely microscopic, and apparently (according to this thread) I need ddraw.ini in order to remedy that. So, deleting it isn't a real option.

What can I do about this? Is there some variable I can change to force ddraw or sfall or whatever it is to run the game at its "unexpected" size? Or is there perhaps some way to change the main exe's icon that doesn't alter its size at all? Or can I make the game properly widescreen without ddraw.ini at all? Or something else I haven't considered?

Please help, this has been eating at me for a week...

 

I know how to change shortcut icons - the problem is the icon for the program itself, which shows up on the taskbar and cannot be changed through Properties. Changing the icon for the program itself via Resource Hacker leads to all the problems detailed above.

 

Thank you so much, Samira! I'm definitely on the right track now, but now I've got a new error.

Apparently what I had was an outdated version of sfall that didn't have that line of code that was linked - I had v3 instead of v4. Remedied easily enough, downloaded v4 and replaced v3, set the SkipSizeCheck variable from 0 to 1.

Now it's the Extra CRC variable that seems to be the problem, and I'm unsure how to fix it.

The error I'm getting is different, and it now reads:

"You're trying to use sfall with an incompatible version of fallout
Was expecting 'Fallout 2 v1.02 US'

fallout2.exe has an unexpected CRC. Expected 0x1680293 but got 0xfa3d525a."

I thought what I would have to do then is put the latter value into the ExtraCRC variable that was linked. I did, still got the same error. Decided to try putting both values into the ExtraCRC variable, just to be thorough. Still get the same error.

Looked for potential answers elsewhere, found the suggestion to boot up the exe directly instead of from the launcher. I did, and the error is the same, but the latter value is different: "Expected 0x1680293 but got 0xe40b8b5e." Plugged that value into ExtraCRC, still no dice.

Then tried enabling debug mode in ddraw.ini, even though the code says the ExtraCRC variable will work without it. Same result.

So, I tried a clean install. It worked. I replaced sfall v3 with sfall v4. It worked. I changed the SkipSizeCheck variable from 0 to 1. Still worked. Changed the icon of Fallout 2 from Tim Cain's dead eyed stare to something different - go the exact same errors about unexpected CRC, with the same values.

Am I doing something wrong? Those lines of ddraw.ini reads thusly, as I've altered it:

;If you're testing changes to the Fallout exe, you can override the CRC that sfall looks for here
;You can use several hex values, separated by commas
;Does not require sfall debugging mode
;ExtraCRC=0x1680293,0xfa3d525a,0xe40b8b5e

 

I... did not know I had to do that. <@@> I'm completely uneducated in coding, but god, it seems obvious now; all the other command lines didn't have semicolons.

It works now! Thank you so much Samira and Nirran, this was driving me up a wall. Cheers!