Thrillville: Off the Rails: (Borderless) Windowed mode work around

There is no windowed mode in Thrillville Off the Rails, or at the very least there is no official documented way to make the game run in windowed mode (or borderless windowed/fullscreen). Nothing in the settings, no .INI or config file, F11 or ALT+ENTER doesn’t work, nothing.

Luckily there is a third party tool/mod you can add to the game to force it into windowed mode… A janky windowed mode, but a windowed mode none the less.

We’ll be using dxwrapper to hook onto the game using Direct X, and force it to display in (borderless) windowed mode.

Download dxwrapper here[github.com] and click on the latest release, located on the right side of page, under the about information. (If link gets removed, just look it up and if the site looks like what’s on screen, you’re good.)

Next, under the page’s instructions, click on the dxwrapper.zip hyperlink. Or alternatively, scroll all the way down and download the file named dxwrapper.zip

You’re version of Windows should support the ability to view, extract and create zip files just fine, but if you are having trouble opening or extracting from them using windows’s default method, considering getting a third party program such as 7-zip, win-zip, WinRAR, etc.

Open dxwrapper.zip and open Thrillville’s game folder. Easiest way to find the game folder is to right click on the game in your Steam Library, and it should be under Manage > Browse local files

With both windows viewable, drag and drop dxwrapper.dll and dxwrapper.ini into the Thrillville game folder.

Next, within dxwrapper.zip, open the stub folder and find the file named d3d9.dll. Drag and drop that too into the Thrillville game folder.

You may now close the zip file. Within the Thrillville folder, open the dxwrapper.ini file, as we need to make a couple of edits to it. Under Compatibility, Set EnableD3d9Wrapper to 1. Then, under d3d9, set EnableWindowMode to 1. Lastly, if you want standard windowed mode , right under the setting you just changed, set WindowModeBorder to 1. Don’t forget to save your changes.

(NOTE: Opening the ini should open a text editor like notepad or wordpad. If it doesn’t, right click on the file and under open with , choose notepad.

The game should now open in windowed mode, with or without a border depending on what you set in the ini file. The resolution/size it will run in will be whatever you set the game’s resolution in the options menu.

Here are some examples of the game running in multiple different modes:
(my desktop runs in 1920×1080)

Game running in 1600×900 windowed mode:

Game running in 1600×900 windowed mode with no borders:

Game running in 1920×1080 borderless windowed mode:

Game running in 800×600 windowed mode:

lol

There is one issue with this method of windowed mode though: it does not lock your mouse inside of the game. This means you can move your mouse out of the game window and click on stuff outside of the game. This also means as soon as it happens, the game’s cursor desyncs with your real mouse and doesn’t follow where your actual cursor is. This is unfortunate, but Thrillville can be fully controlled via the keyboard, so you shouldn’t be locked out of any content, though a few mini-games might be better controlled with a mouse.

If you’re playing with a controller, this should be a non-issue. You also shouldn’t have any issues if the game is set to Fullscreen borderless.

(Unknown: mouse may still escape in fullscreen borderless if there are multiple monitors?)

If you read the discussion page, you might have seen suggestions to use dxwnd to also force the game into windowed mode. In theory this should work, and it seems like some people were able to get this working. However, whenever I try to open the game (or the other exe named testapp), this always happens no matter what settings are applied:

Yeah… The issue is that the game won’t open if it’s not opened with steam, to which I don’t know how to hook dxwnd to Steam’s method of opening the game, even though the discussion pages just says to drag and drop the exe into dxwnd. Creating a shortcut and putting that into dxwnd also doesn’t work. Maybe there’s a way, I just don’t know it.