Re: 3D Game Engine Development

Posted on 2024-01-16, 11:18

by

by Deano

in DOS

in DOS

Your vertex interpolations looks good for 15 bit. Thats classic RGB iterations I'd expect to see. Is your rasterization a bit off or is your cube not welded properly? The second video I can see red peeping through on the back face when it shouldn't EVEN with no back face culling. Usually this is …

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Re: Doubts about ATI rage, SiS and others with 8MB

Posted on 2024-01-15, 15:55

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Vector Quantisation was used as the Dreamcast 's main compression format, so the Kyro's had the hardware as well probablu. Its closely related to CLUT/Palette compression. VQ isn't as good as BC1 AKA DXT1 AKA S3TC for the same bit rate and was never standardized, probably each IHV has slightly …

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Re: What game are you playing now?

Posted on 2024-01-12, 21:45

by

by Deano

in Milliways

in Milliways

Just started Diablo v1.00 for the first time just like if I'd brought it new at the time. Streaming as well so others can have a laugh. First 2 hours and 4 deaths 🤣 Death count is going to get very high I imagine!

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Re: Dual PIII build notes (mostly on the software setup side)

Posted on 2024-01-12, 10:24

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I also wonder how much CL2 RAM would help? need to get some and see if its noticable.

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Re: Dual PIII build notes (mostly on the software setup side)

Posted on 2024-01-12, 10:22

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Really interesting post. I was surprised to see most of the 3DMark99 results under 6000 on a 1.4Ghz. All my machines (PIII 850Mhz each) have a score of over 6000. It must come down to the motherboard. Maybe a server based motherboard has less gaming performance? I’m setting up a dual PIII 1Ghz …

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Re: Dual PIII build notes (mostly on the software setup side)

Posted on 2024-01-12, 10:17

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Will this setup with 3 different partitions still have the "Select operating system" list at boot? As of now, I have W98, 2K and XP on the same partition, but in different install directories ... It makes a bit of a mess :lol: Yep but you must install them in the order, Win98, Win2K, WinXP. Its …

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Re: Dual PIII build notes (mostly on the software setup side)

Posted on 2024-01-12, 09:01

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You are correct about the audio, will edit the post. yeah Its a nice system, its dos compat is a bit rubbish but to be expected with an PCI/AGP only system. Want to try out the scsi soon, see if its noticable faster over IDE.

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Re: Dual PIII build notes (mostly on the software setup side)

Posted on 2024-01-12, 07:14

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Under W98 the second CPU isn't active (in any meaningful way), on NT based OS its used and OS stuff can run on the second CPU even in single threaded games. Normally I see about 5-10% boost over same game in Win98, a bit more when using a Alcohol 120% as a CD emulator. So its not really a big win, …

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Re: Dual PIII build notes (mostly on the software setup side)

Posted on 2024-01-12, 06:47

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

WinXP wouldn't let me format them as FAT32 if the were more than 32GB (and wanted them to all be shared). Win9x wouldn't fdisk a 80GB drive. Yeah I'd like to give is a pair of Voodoo's 2 (Sadly I don't have the pair 3DFX sent me, though still have the keyring!) but so expensive, will have to wait …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-01-11, 11:57

by

by Deano

in Milliways

in Milliways

KA9Q was how Internet early adopters in the UK began there interweb journey, Demon Internet provided it as the default client. Whilst early Win Trumpet did exist around them, it was awful it you didn't have a hardware FIFO uart so most people used KA9Q under DOS. Usenet, email, telnet and FTP, all …

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Dual PIII build notes (mostly on the software setup side)

Posted on 2024-01-11, 09:19

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello, Here are my build notes for a unusual(ish) build. Goals: Window 9x/W2k/early XP game machine, Good for DirectX prior to 9 games machine, cut off date = release of Silent Hill 2 PC (last game pre DX9 game I was involved with) 1997 - 2002 era - nice if able to play some games few year either …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2024-01-08, 06:51

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Went into local computer shop to pick up the cheapest modern E-ATX case, as didn't have an era appropriate E-ATX around, and asked about a Quadro 1100 AGP card they have on the website. That was a mistake on the website but he dig around and found a few AGP cards. Most were usual low end 5200/5500's …

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Re: Network issues with Windows 98

Posted on 2024-01-07, 13:14

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

The password might be the fact your username is used for the network user name and it has to match exactly. For RetroNAS for example, I always install Win98 as user "pi" any other name and it never works. BTW I never see anybody in the network neighbourhood but access direct (i.e. \\retrosmb works …

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Re: 2D Acceleration - first chipsets

Posted on 2023-12-27, 10:41

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's not really a feature of VGA, but rather its RAMDAC, but.. Palette cycling kind of was an intelligent feature, too. No the RAMDAC also has a palette mask field but VGA write mode (2+3 IIRC) can apply a 8 bit logic op (AND/OR/XOR) to the incoming data. It was originally designed to ease 4 bit …

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Re: 2D Acceleration - first chipsets

Posted on 2023-12-27, 06:48

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The "VGA minimal acceleration" is a trick where you can force VGA to write 2 or 4 bytes for every byte you write. Its clunky, difficult to handle forcing unchained mode where framebuffer is no longer a linear stream of bytes, and works only for consecutive strips of bytes http://www.brackeen.com/ …

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Re: 2D Acceleration - first chipsets

Posted on 2023-12-27, 06:40

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Descent 1/2 dont use FPU in software rendering mode. Maybe it was Forsaken, one of them did. In early 3D accelerated games we still didn't use floats that much because 3D cards didn't consume floats, triangle setup engines only appear in 2nd gen cards (Voodoo II and RIVIA for example). 3D cards do …

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Re: 2D Acceleration - first chipsets

Posted on 2023-12-26, 15:58

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

We all did write for all the SVGA different sets (or at least the top 5) but we had no info on acceleration (they never gave it to us) and so fell back to VESA for the uncommon ones. As for OpenGL or DirectX being write once for all cards not in the early days at the very least. Every card was so …

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Re: 2D Acceleration - first chipsets

Posted on 2023-12-26, 14:16

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

MMX is a general-purpose SIMD instruction set and software need to have explicit support for it. Some games such Rebel Moon Rising, Extreme Assault and POD used it for software rendering, but performance pales in comparison to real 3D hardware accelerators. MMX is integer only, wasn't until SSE …

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Re: 2D Acceleration - first chipsets

Posted on 2023-12-26, 14:14

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Its also worth noting that good 'ld VGA does have some minimal acceleration features in it, the biggest reason they didn't get use more was that the ISA bus was so slow once we got to 386+ that it was faster to use a CPU local buffer and copy that up on vsync than actually work on the VGA side.

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Re: 2D Acceleration - first chipsets

Posted on 2023-12-26, 14:10

by

by Deano

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The reason games didn't use the FPU until Quake era was because FPU were much slower than using fixed point integer in almost all cases for games. Quake and Descent were the first to notice that whilst its divide was still quite slow it could occur in parallel to the normal integer ALUs. In early 3D …

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