Nioh 2

Nioh 2

The third title fixed by the bridge written for Persona 5 Strikers, and the one that cost nothing: no code change, no rebuild, the same proxy binary already built for Nioh.

Video	WMV3 in ASF, 529 files
Played by	IMFSourceReader on Media Foundation, presented onto a shared D3D9 surface
Symptom	The cutscene refuses to play, then the game crashes
Fix	Stage the WMV3 decoder, then hand the game a share handle that exists
Backend	DXMT only. The sidecar needs GetSharedHandle, E_NOTIMPL under D3DMetal
CrossOver	crossover-preview-arm64-20260821. Not tried on 26.3

What it shares with Nioh, and what it does not

Same carrier — GfeSDK.dll, exporting the identical 16 symbols, so the proxy built for Nioh installs here untouched. Same WMV3-in-ASF video. Same pair of d3d9 and d3d11 imports, and the same fault underneath: a shared render target that D3D9 creates, reports S_OK for, and hands back with a share handle of zero.

What differs is everything above that line. Nioh builds a DirectShow graph; Nioh 2 imports MF, MFPlat, MFReadWrite and dxva2 and goes through Media Foundation, which is Persona 5 Strikers' route rather than its own predecessor's.

That difference is visible in what the bridge caught:

import table: 4 of 6 Media Foundation and D3D9 entries hooked
MFStartup(version=0x20070, flags=0x0) -> S_OK
MFCreateSourceReaderFromByteStream -> S_OK (reader 1)
  -> ASF header, so the container is what it should be
  stream 0 offers: 'I420'   stream 0 asked for: 'NV12'

Four hooks where Nioh landed two, and a source reader Nioh never created. The bridge needed to know none of it: it watches the shared surface, not the player.

CreateRenderTarget(1920x1080 fmt=22, SHARED requested) -> S_OK, handle 0
sidecar: 1920x1080 texture, GetSharedHandle -> S_OK, handle 40000102
StretchRect INTO it
source luma [120]: average 72, range 18..230   << has picture

The frame format differs and nothing had to care

Nioh's frames arrived in a four-byte format at a pitch of 7680. Nioh 2's arrive as NV12 at a pitch of 1920. The NV12-to-BGRA converter that came across from DYNASTY WARRIORS handled the difference with no adjustment — the second time that converter has moved between titles unchanged.

Caveats

Do not use this on a game with anti-cheat. The fix patches a running process.

Measured on Preview and on DXMT only. 26.3 has not been tried. Under D3DMetal the sidecar has nothing to build on, since GetSharedHandle is E_NOTIMPL there, so it is not expected to work — but that has not been run either.

What it cost

One run. The preparation was three read-only checks that could each have sent this down a longer road and did not: the video is WMV3 in ASF like Nioh's, the carrier exports the identical 16 symbols so no rebuild was needed, and the executable imports both d3d9 and d3d11.