Special K not working with Sven Co-op (but it previously did)

Sven Co-op is a free game on Steam. It is a modded, co-op version of the Half-Life (1998) game.

I like for my games to have custom window sizes. Out of the 224 games that I own on Steam, 370 games that I own on Epic Games, and the countless other games that I have played, Sven Co-op is probably the only game that I have encountered that won’t let me have a custom window size. I find this behavior strange since the original Half-Life (1998), Blue Shift, and Opposing Force games allow for custom window sizes.

DxWnd has always been my solution for games that won’t let me have custom window sizes, but even DxWnd would not work on Sven Co-op. I contacted the DxWnd developer and even he could not figure out a fix.

So I was not able to play Sven Co-op for the years 2017 to 2021. I was very sad because it was a game that I wanted to play. But then in 2021, I suddenly had a eureka moment and remembered SpecialK. So I tried SpecialK and it actually worked! I was so happy. I became a Sven Co-op fanatic and played Sven Co-op for the last three or so years.

But for the past month SpecialK no longer works with Sven Co-op. Anytime that I launch Sven Co-op, I get a “Could not load hw.dll.” error message. The game won’t launch and will continue sending those hw.dll errors until I remove the SpecialK files. By the way, I am using the local installation method for SpecialK. I have two files both named opengl32. One is the dll file and the other is the config file.

I know that the generic response to my problem is probably going to be something like “well I guess you are SOL because your game has some sort of anti cheat that won’t allow you to use SpecialK. tough luck. you are just going to have to deal with it.” But is there anything that you can do to make it work?

In the past 3-4 years, I did get that hl.dll error before several times but it only lasted for a day or two and then went away. My guess that the reason it won’t go away this time for an entire month is that the Sven Co-op developer had some sort of anti-cheat in place that didn’t really work until recently. He must have fixed it.

I have tried doing a clean install of Sven Co-op, but that didn’t help.

Anyway, is there anything that I can do? Will using the global install method make a difference? Is there anything else that I can try? Is there anything you can do to make SpecialK work with Sven Co-op? All I want to do is have a custom window size because I don’t like the standard window sizes and I don’t like fullscreen mode. I’m not using this to cheat or have an unfair advantage over other players. I am just a casual player that likes to spectate and sometimes play the game.

UPDATE: I tried SK_41_4_4, today’s stable version of SK (Sep 20, 2024), and yesterday’s test version (Sep 19, 2024). On all of them, when I rename the SpecialK32.dll file to opengl32.dll and try to launch the game, the game won’t launch and will throw the “Could not load hw.dll” error message.