DrMcCoy

To me, that sounds like the OpenGL path of your graphics driver doesn't like the high native resolution of your 4k monitor. It fails creating an accelerated OpenGL context, and then just creates a software one, or lets Windows create a compatibility one that maps to Direct3D, or something like that. Those then often lack a lot of the features, leading to weird graphical glitches and bugs. One thing you could try is to enable windowed mode in KotOR. For that, you need to edit the "swkotor.ini" file in the installation directory of the game. In the "[Graphics Options]" section, there should be a "FullScreen=1" line. Change it to "FullScreen=0" and add a new line with "AllowWindowedMode=1" below that as well. Also, you can set "Width" and "Height" (a couple of lines above), but try 800x600 or something like that for a start.

KotOR doesn't use Direct3D, though, it renders using OpenGL. It does however call DirectInput8Create, so I guess uses DirectInput to read mouse/keyboard events. But the rendering is all OpenGL. You should check if you can get appropriate graphics drivers for your hardware; the ones coming with Windows might have no OpenGL implementation.

Yeah, the GUIs in the KotOR games (and Jade Empire too) are very hardcoded. There are GUI files (which are GFF), which contain information about the layout, but they're more used as guidelines. The game executable knows about the layout of all the GUIs, and instantiates the classes for the elements. It then looks into the GUI files and only picks certain fields out of them, and applies them to the elements. Which fields are read from the GUI files also changes depending on the GUI and the elements, so it's very likely that the sizes of certain elements are hardcoded. Finding that out was actually pretty disappointing. It's just so...hacky.

There's also this thing here on the Neverwinter Vault: http://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/tool/tlkedit2-2datlkgfferf-editor, which can edit KotOR's GFFs. NWN, NWN2, KotOR, KotOR2 and Jade Empire all use basically the same GFF format (*). As does The Witcher, but it bumps the version number by 0.1 and encodes all LocStrings as UTF-8. (*) Except that list of field types grew a bit over time. I *think* NWN didn't have 16 (Orientation) and 17 (Vector) and Jade Empire adds 18 (StrRef).

Or alternatively, if you (or anybody else reading) are proficient in C++, consider extending the xoreos tools with an xml2tlk program. We're a very small team (so small that it's still mostly just me ), and are always looking for more devs to join in the fun. Anybody interested just poke me in #xoreos on Freenode IRC or write to the mailing list, and read over the Developer Central page on our wiki. </shamelessplug>