Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004)

test/binaries/candidates/pirates-2004/digital/app/Pirates!.exe, registry id pirates_2004 (d3d9Programmable, bigMemory). Direct3D 9, statically linked (d3d9.dll import), with msvcr71/msvcp71, Bink, Miles (mss32 plus its win32/*.asi, *.m3d, *.flt providers) and oleaut32 from the game directory.

Route to the main menu (CLI, software D3D9 arm)

node test/run.js --app=pirates_2004 --d3d9-renderer=software --batch-size=100000 \
  --max-batches=1000000 --max-seconds=180 --stuck-after=1000000 --no-close --png=menu.png

The D3D9 main menu (Play Sid Meier's Pirates!, Load A Game, Change Your System Options, Visit The Firaxis Website, Visit The Hall Of Champions, View Credits, Quit, over the Caribbean map) is up by batch ~1000 at --batch-size=100000. Assets load from assets\pak*.fpk one byte per ReadFile, which is slow but correct. Evidence: scratch/runs/20261006T033534Z-pirates_2004-dxinit.

Startup, as reverse engineered (2026-10-06)

0x4d2950 is graphics init. It calls 0x500080 (device setup); a nonzero result goes to an error path that first asks the DxDiag provider for the DirectX version (0x4ad050, through the game's dxdiagn.dll COM server) only to choose the message: below 9.0c (0x90003) it shows the "requires DirectX 9.0c" text at 0x70e234, otherwise "Unable to initialize DirectX." So that message never means the DirectX version check failed.
Device setup creates a HAL device with software vertex processing (BehaviorFlags 0x24), reads the render target, depth surface and GetDeviceCaps, and at 0x5c0963 requires MaxTextureBlendStages >= 2 and MaxSimultaneousTextures >= 2. Its caps record is at this+0x644; it also reads MaxVertexBlendMatrices (+0xa8), MaxStreams, and the vertex/pixel shader versions (+0xc4/+0xcc; the helper at 0x5002f0 returns them as major*10+minor to about twenty callers).
Miles' A3D provider win32\mssa3d.m3d asks CoCreateInstance for Aureal's class (a3dapi.dll), which no machine without an A3D card has.

Fixed

commit	what
`ba161dfb`	D3D9 caps advertise `MaxTextureBlendStages = 6` (was 0)
`12408feb`	a `CoCreateInstance` whose in-proc DLL is missing resumes the caller (the yield pump left EIP on the thunk and re-ran it on the caller stack) and clears `*ppv`
`d7f5a429`	`test/run.js` honours `bigMemory` (2048 MB); at 512 MB the asset load runs out of guest heap

Not yet looked at

Gameplay (Play Sid Meier's Pirates!), audio, the WebGL arm at this build. ole32.dll is absent from this box's test/binaries/dlls, so the Miles providers' ole32 imports fall to WAT stubs.