With the new remake of White Day: A Labyrinth Named School being released in English for iOS and Android, as well as the PC sometime soon, now seems like a good time to revisit, or experience for the first time, the original Korean classic that started it all. Although it was never officially localized, the original White Day can still be played in English thanks to a fan mod that was released by Unnamed back in 2012 or so. The translated version is freeware and can be easily download from ModDB but what is not so easy is getting the game to run on a modern PC.
I ran into several crashes and bugs when I first attempted to play White Day on my Windows 10 computer and it took me a few months to figure out exactly what I had to do in order to get everything working properly. I've seen other people having similar problems so I thought I'd share the solutions I used so that others can have a smoother White Day experience.
I'll run down some of the common problems I, and many others, have encountered and walk through the solutions to fix them. Now there may be other ways to troubleshoot these problems but this is what I found to work and the game hasn't crashed once since I implemented these fixes. Hopefully they work for your computer but I can only share what I know.
The Floating Door Knob
One of the most common issues people run into when trying to start White Day is being unable to get past the first room. None of the doors work and there are several graphical glitches, such as a door knob floating midair in the center of the room. The reason for this bug is that your computer is not running in the Korean Locale, since this is a Korean title it will not work properly on a computer from a different region. The fan mod got around this by installing AppLocale, a program made by Microsoft that allows applications from any region to run on any computer. However AppLocale does not work on modern Windows operating systems, so even though the fan mod installs the program it won't actually work once you start the game.
The workaround I saw many people suggest online was to use an AppLocale substitute called Locale Emulator. Basically once you install the software you can right-click on a program and run it in any locale that you have created a profile for. I found this to work perfectly but be careful when installing the program because once it is installed you will not be able to move it to another folder. Also make sure to start White Day through the "WhiteDay - Start" executable instead of the one simply labeled "whiteday." The game will start no matter which you click on but the "WhiteDay - Start" executable is more stable while the other crashes randomly.
If for whatever reason you don't want to install Locale Emulator the only other way to run White Day that I know of is to change your computer's system locale to Korean by going to the "Region" option in the Control Panel. This an annoying process since you will need to restart your computer every time you change the locale and you'll need to change it back to your primary locale once you are done playing the game.
Everything Is Running Too Fast
Once White Day is playing in the proper locale you may notice that the game seems to be running fast. Characters move very quickly during gameplay and cut-scenes will be out of sync with the audio.
Now to fix this problem I made the common mistake of changing my graphic card setting to the option beginning with "[DX7]" in the Device Settings tab on the launch menu. This appears to work at first but eventually causes the game to crash later on and messes up some of the lighting effects (such as the match and lighter looking like a flat glowing polygon instead of a flame). So don't do that, keep that setting on "[DX8]" which is what it defaults too anyway.
The actual problem here is that the game is trying to run in DirectX 8 but it can't since it is no longer supported by modern operating systems, at least that is how I understand it. So in order to have White Day run properly in DirectX 8 you will need a wrapper, which is just a simple DLL file that you place in the same folder where the executable is located. There are several different DirectX 8 wrappers out there but I downloaded mine from HERE.
Once the wrapper is placed in the "WHITEDAY" folder the game should run at normal speeds.
Conclusion
So to summarize, in order to run White Day on a Windows 10 computer, or any other modern Windows operating systems, you need to:
- Download the game from ModDB
- Install Locale Emulator in order to run the game in Korean locale
- Place a DirectX 8 wrapper in the "WHITEDAY" folder
- And always start the game using the "WhiteDay - Start" executable
And that is it! White Day should run perfectly after following all these steps and if it doesn't then I'm not sure I can help you. Everyone's computer is different and this is just what worked for me and should also theoretically work for anyone with a Windows 10 computer. If you have any other kind of technical questions or need help with troubleshooting something I would suggest going to the Unnamed forums, which is the official forum for White Day's fan translation. I found some of the solutions to my problems there and I'm sure the people there could help you more than I could.
I hope this blog was helpful and have fun playing White Day!
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