BCMM January 2026 Progress Report

Intro

A number of updates have landed in BCMM recently. This post provides a concise overview of what's new, with links to deeper articles where appropriate.

Widescreen support and new resolutions

This topic was covered in detail in a separate article, so if you haven't read it yet, I recommend starting there. What's worth reiterating here is that BCMM does not treat resolution as a literal rendering size anymore.

Instead, the selected resolution acts as a layout profile.

The profile defines UI proportions, font sizes, and layout logic, which are then used as the basis for upscaling. This allows proper support for modern aspect ratios such as 16:9 and 21:9 without stretching or breaking the UI.

In addition to the original inbuilt 4:3 layouts, BCMM introduces two new widescreen layouts:

• Full HD (1920x1080)
• 2K / QHD (2560x1440)

New fonts

This was also covered in a separate article, but it's worth highlighting again. For the first time since 2001, Bridge Commander ships with new fonts and a UI that is actually designed for modern displays.

This is not a cosmetic tweak.

Updated fonts were one of the most frequently requested UI improvements over the years, and they fundamentally change how the interface reads and scales on high-resolution screens.

The newly introduced fonts are:

• Okuda
• Antonio

Bypassing the multiplayer ship type limit

Bridge Commander has a hard limit of 128 registered ship types in multiplayer. The reason is simple: the ship type identifier is transmitted as an sbyte over the network.

Kobayashi Maru addressed this years ago by detecting overflow and correcting it by converting the value to a byte, effectively expanding the limit to 255 ship types using a simple overflow correction.

if overflow < 0: 
    fix += 256

That worked, but only up to a point.

In BCMM, this entire section was rewritten. The new implementation extends the limit to roughly 2 billion ship types. This is deliberate overkill. A short data type would have pushed the limit to around 65k, which is already far beyond any realistic use case. The BCMM approach removes the constraint entirely.

EAX fix

I can't take credit for this one.

I was pointed to an external component that restores EAX support in older games and decided to test it with Bridge Commander. The results were solid enough that it made sense to integrate it directly into BCMM.

The component is distributed as part of the BCMM setup and is enabled automatically. From the user's perspective, no manual configuration is required and EAX support is restored transparently as part of the overall audio pipeline.

dgVoodoo support

By default, BCMM does not use dgVoodoo, nor does it rely on it. However, there were questions about whether tools such as ReShade could still be used with BCMM.

This section answers that.

The default BCMM renderer is still recommended, as it includes numerous built-in patches and improvements. That said, it is possible to switch the presenter to dgVoodoo if needed. Some BCMM-specific features will not be available in that configuration.

Setup is straightforward. The BCMM Launcher provides a preset that automatically downloads and configures dgVoodoo.