Problem with Icewind Dale Gold mirrored sprites

I am currently playing Icewind Dale Gold, an outstanding D&D based dungeon crawler. It works with almost no problems on my Pentium 4 2.93GHz Prescott, 1.5GB RAM DDR2 and Radeon HD4650 1GB PciE, running Windows XP SP3 and DirectX 9.0c.

However, there is only one minor issue that I was not able to fix no matter what - it is the Mirrored Sprites option, accessible from games setup, under Graphics tab. Basically, it makes characters' sprites animation being mirrored, i.e. when character is facing right and hold his shield in his right hands, then after turning and facing left the shield is immediately swapped to his left hand, being a mirror reflection of his previous stance. In the old days it allowed to save some memory and increase game performance. Nowadays I am not able to turn this option off - it is always active.

I noticed this happens in almost every game based on Infinity engine I tried in the past years (Icewind Dale 2, Baldur's Gate Gold). I also used different hardware specs (Radeon 9550 AGP, Pentium 4 2GHz Northwood, Celeron D 3.2GHz, Athlon 2400XP+, DualCore E5200), with no results.

Do you by any chance know if it is a known bug and is there is any solution for this?

Just note I use localized, Polish versions of these games - could this problem be version-specific?

Thank you in advance.

Solution 1:

I've had some serious problems with IceWind Dale 1 and 2 on modern systems. After some heavy experimenting, someone told me to disable 2D DirectX acceleration in dxdiag, and that solved the problems.

Try it out.