How to launch A Force More Powerful in Windows 11

Being somewhat of a connoisseur of (a)political strategy games (see my contributions here), I have recently been delighted to discover the late Steve York's contributions to the genre: the 2006 A Force More Powerful (based on his eponymous documentary movie) and the 2010 People Power. While I have gotten People Power running in Adobe AIR on my Windows 11 machine without issue, my attempts to launch AFMP have been thwarted by the persistent startup crash:

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Renderer Creation Failure
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D3D Renderer Creation Failed
Make sure DirectX 9.0 or later is installed correctly
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After the official solution on the now-defunct website did not help, I began poking at other methods that have worked for other ancient games, like dxWind or booting up a Windows XP VM in VMware Player, just to see that the game can run at all. Eventually, I did arrive at the most elegant and open-sourced solution:

  1. Install the game (no, I won't tell you where to get it) and patch 1.0.0.5
  2. Download and unzip Federico Dossena's WineD3D
  3. Drop the files d3d9.dll and wine3d.dll from the archive into the game's folder (next to AFMP.exe)
  4. Launch the game normally

If everything works as expected, you should see the main menu of the game stretched up to full screen. Enjoy!