MechanicalSanity wrote on 2023-05-28, 05:19:

brightness slider does work for sure on voodoo cards.

are you sure about that

@JH64:

If I may make a suggestion: Wouldn't it be a better approach (also from a long-term maintainability perspective) to implement SoftGPU as a VirGL driver for Windows guests? In both Win9x and NT+ variants?

As powerful as VirtualBox is, it's ultimately developed exclusively by Oracle, which isn't always quick in terms of evolving the product or even accepting community contributions, and keeps some premium stuff (such as NVMe support) closed-source.

I'm not saying that QEMU is perfect, but it's an open-source project from the ground up, with a much larger and open development community.

Thanks for considering, and at any rate, kudos for your work on this so far!

JH64 wrote on 2023-05-27, 23:24:

@ruthan: With VMware is one big problem, GPU acceleration isn’t enabled by default (regardless of the state of the checkbox). The VMware tools on guest are communicating with hypervisor and if have right VMware tools to right VMware version and to right host and guest OS and even when the stars are in the right constellation then the HW acceleration will be exposed to the guest. I don’t know right guest<-> hypervisor communication but if someone observe it (from example from Linux VMware tools) I gladly add it to SoftGPU. I currently done only light testing to VMware player, if I will have some time, I could do more complex testing.

Well VMware is mentioned documentation as supported, i would be really careful, about such compatibility claims.. if is not fully tested. S o far we know that is running in - softpipe mode and there is not clear procedure how to make it run with SVGA3D.. you made it working, maybe you didnt.. but documentation is silent about it such possibilities.. Wishful thinking / promises are more likely to hurt project than help..

Otherwise there is more solution of problem and we are getting there for long time.. than Win9x become obsolete, because all these Win9x games would be patched by community+publishers to run on modern OSes with some wrappers until they will completely modern OSes would drop 32bit backward compatibility support.. Yeah we are getting there too 🙁 Maybe in Windows 12?

Its sort of the same thing you have to tune virtual gpu driver compatibility on game basis, or you have to patch games one by one to run on modern OSes..

Disadvantages of this solution are:
1) quality of these patches and wrappers, they have bugs too..
2) You have to google and actively search for patches often if they are not part of some modern game digital release
3) Nobody would patch demo, Win9x era was great because of demo you could actually try most of the games before you buy them.. so you have to buy full versions and lots of games are not GoG and physical copies could get quite expensive..
4) Some game are not patched.. but truely is somewhere that short list of games.. which really cant we run on Win10 64bit with some patches? Because when i want to run some old game on WIn10 and usually find the solution..

Advantages:
A) Fixes could be used by companies as GoG, they will never use Win9x virtual machines, because it needs Win98 not free license and MS will not sell them for these.
B) Not need for Virtual machine setup and port game installation into it.
C) All run with native HW speed raw power, yes are losing some performance on wrappers, hacks, but there is always enough performance..
D) Wrappers like dgVoodoo or nGLide can actually enhance game visual quality..

ruthan wrote on 2023-05-28, 22:12:

Otherwise there is more solution of problem and we are getting there for long time.. than Win9x become obsolete, because all the […]
Show full quote

Otherwise there is more solution of problem and we are getting there for long time.. than Win9x become obsolete, because all these Win9x games would be patched by community+publishers to run on modern OSes with some wrappers until they will completely modern OSes would drop 32bit backward compatibility support.. Yeah we are getting there too 🙁 Maybe in Windows 12?

Its sort of the same thing you have to tune virtual gpu driver compatibility on game basis, or you have to patch games one by one to run on modern OSes..

Disadvantages of this solution are:
1) quality of these patches and wrappers, they have bugs too..
2) You have to google and actively search for patches often if they are not part of some modern game digital release
3) Nobody would patch demo, Win9x era was great because of demo you could actually try most of the games before you buy them.. so you have to buy full versions and lots of games are not GoG and physical copies could get quite expensive..
4) Some game are not patched.. but truely is somewhere that short list of games.. which really cant we run on Win10 64bit with some patches? Because when i want to run some old game on WIn10 and usually find the solution..

Advantages:
A) Fixes could be used by companies as GoG, they will never use Win9x virtual machines, because it needs Win98 not free license and MS will not sell them for these.
B) Not need for Virtual machine setup and port game installation into it.
C) All run with native HW speed raw power, yes are losing some performance on wrappers, hacks, but there is always enough performance..
D) Wrappers like dgVoodoo or nGLide can actually enhance game visual quality..

I did note that compatibility was a main concern of mine (I think, if I didn't I am dumb). That's why I suggested the emulated gpu solution. In theory, once we get it up and running, we could "overclock" the gpu's and give it a lot more juice to work with, perhaps enhancing certain aspects to allow more features. IDK. That kind of talk is far future and perhaps impossible.
But you also have a really good point with advantages.
In the end, I just hope whatever happens just works well enough.

thx for SoftGPU mr jh64.
i would like to ask a question, i have very little knowledge of technical things
is it possible to send data to host and make calculations on 1 or more cores instead doing work inside vm cpu?

MechanicalSanity wrote on 2023-05-30, 02:42:

I did note that compatibility was a main concern of mine (I think, if I didn't I am dumb). That's why I suggested the emulated gpu solution. In theory, once we get it up and running, we could "overclock" the gpu's and give it a lot more juice to work with, perhaps enhancing certain aspects to allow more features. IDK. That kind of talk is far future and perhaps impossible.
But you also have a really good point with advantages.
In the end, I just hope whatever happens just works well enough.

Present solution seems to have few main general problems, which i dont need to be tuned on game basic, if would be developer i would start with these:
1) Too slow performance in some games
2) Some games running too fast.. some proper frame pacing has to be impelemented
3) Missing models in more modern D3D games - probably because not yet implemented vertex shaders
4) Missing textures in some games..
5) That black cube mouse cursor rendering bug even in 2D games..
6) Not returning to original Windows desktop resolution after game exits
7) 3D card is not detected by some games - NHL, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Medal of Honor..
*8) Missing control panel/ utility to set - Brightness, FPS cap and show FPS counter in all games..

I really hate undocumented sideloaded hell..

I was playing with SB-EMU with Virtualbox (yes its working for Native Dos sound.. i dont even plan to test that Win9x inbuild- Dos mode mess..-because it need Jemmex and HDPMI32 i doubt it), so i had to edit my autoexec..
Guess what i found at the C:\simd95.com at the end crashing my Dos boot.. and it was loaded after win.com for Windows 98, so it did nothing for Win9x..
I placed it in my Win98 boot branch.. yes lots of people have branched multimenu Windows98/DOS autoexec / configs..
now Win98 boots super fast and SoftGPU reporting AVX as supported, i expect that performance would get much better..

Just add something at the end of autoexec.bat without any mention in documentation or in install utility and expect that it would work is lame work 🙁
Just just 1 line of info could safe me lots of headaches..

Other thing is add some REM comment to autoexec what who and why added this line..

With this fix Quake 3 - max details its running from 20 to 65 FPS, in 800x600 and 1600x1200 is seems that resolution has minimal impact..

Also was able finally execute Gothic II.. initial videos are black screen, menu is ok, some other videos are fine.. game no FPS counter is working, but rendering its fine and its playble 20 FPS+

Some games like Knight of the Temple 2 have not performance improvements, still 5 FPS in-game.. menu is 60 FPS.

Because SB-EM for Vmware is running great:
Re: SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97

What about VmSVGA Dos Glide 😀

Is there any news to speak of for this project? I hope it's not dead.

There was a new release like a month ago, which is fairly recent.

Half-life on opengl works pretty well. Some Audio delays, I think I am noticing frame stutters, but no graphical glitches otherwise.

Direct3d is not doing as well though. Alot more graphical glitches, appears to run worse as well.

Another thing just occurred to me: Wouldn't it be easier to just make vboxvga more compatible with windows 98 and windows 98se?

Just a note for those about dark GLQuake problem...
Some decade ago I also faced it (no brightness slider work) and found it could be fixed by some external utility, I hope it was called idGamma, try it out...
https://www.quaketerminus.com/exe.shtml

Otherwise softgpu looks interesting, I have Vbox 7.0.6 at work so I'll try to install W98 VM and play with it a bit...
UPD: damn, I'm unable to install Win98SE under Virtualbox, hangs under setup, after hardreset I got a bunch of errors when copying/registering DLLs and didn't reach to desktop. When installing W98 in the past under VMware I didn't have such problems...

Hm, same with english ISO...

I think it's better if you follow the instructions at https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu carefully. Everything you need to get this working is explained there, including what causes that error.

You can use Vmware Win98 disc image for Virtualbox and redetect HW its probably faster..

RayeR wrote on 2023-06-12, 17:48:

Just a note for those about dark GLQuake problem... Some decade ago I also faced it (no brightness slider work) and found it cou […]
Show full quote

Just a note for those about dark GLQuake problem...
Some decade ago I also faced it (no brightness slider work) and found it could be fixed by some external utility, I hope it was called idGamma, try it out...
https://www.quaketerminus.com/exe.shtml

Otherwise softgpu looks interesting, I have Vbox 7.0.6 at work so I'll try to install W98 VM and play with it a bit...
UPD: damn, I'm unable to install Win98SE under Virtualbox, hangs under setup, after hardreset I got a bunch of errors when copying/registering DLLs and didn't reach to desktop. When installing W98 in the past under VMware I didn't have such problems...

Hm, same with english ISO...

You probably need to use patcher9x. It seems with very recent CPUs that patch is mandatory for running a Win9x VM.

LSS10999 wrote on 2023-06-13, 00:31:

You probably need to use patcher9x. It seems with very recent CPUs that patch is mandatory for running a Win9x VM.

Aha, thank you for pointing me the right direction. I didn't know about this patch yet (I quickly skipped to VM setup). I run Win98Se native on my Sandybridge i7 @4,5GHz and I didn't needed such patch yet. But this installation is done on much newer Tigerlake i7 (gen. 11) that is explicitly mentioned needing a patch. Well I patched during installation and finally finished the Windows setup. Then I just installed DX9, MSVCRT, and SoftGPU. I selected SSE/AVX option but got crashes and BSODs after restart when driver being active. So I disabled simd95.com and reinstalled with basic options. I got one BSOD after changing resolution from default to 1024x768/32bpp but after reboot it started normally and I was able to run GLchecker and Blender benchmark and got ~45FPS. Later I got BSOD again and the Windows swithced back to 640x480 and hanged at desktop loads. I can boot only in safemode.

Well, as I was unable to recover current installation I made new one. Now I copied install files from ISO to HDD and run patch9x over CAB files. Windows installed OK and seems to be stable untill...
I installed MSVCRT, DX9 and SoftGPU without AVX/SSE (made restart after each component as suggested)
* after 1st restart (after SoftGPU install) system hanged at logon screen - hardreset
* 2nd start - system booted to desktop and immediatelly folowed by BSOD - hardreset
* 3rd start - system booted to desktop and I was able to go to display control panel and set 1024x768/32bpp, system asked for restart and hanged - hardreset
*4th start - system booted to desktop and hanged (mouse cursor moving with permanent hourglass, no reaction to CTRL+ALT+DEL) - hardreset
*5th start - system booted to desktop and hanged (mouse cursor doesn't move with permanent hourglass, no reaction to CTRL+ALT+DEL) - hardreset
*6th start - system booted to desktop and was responsive, I can go again to display control panel where is default 640x480/8bpp, I set 800x600/16bpp and it hanged again when restart required - hardreset
*7th start - system booted to desktop and was responsive after a while, I can go again to display control panel where is default 640x480/8bpp, I set 1024x768/32bpp and set make change without restarting, surprisingly it changed resolution as expected and I could run GLchecker and Blender benchmark (again 45-48FPS)
*8rh restart that I did correctly via Star menu - system booted to desktop (1024x768) and hanged (mouse cursor not moving with permanent hourglass, no reaction to CTRL+ALT+DEL) - hardreset

I'm a bit confused about this random behavior...

I did all my testing with Hyper-V disabled, on Windows its enabled as default and Virtualbox is using it. so intel virtualization is off.. i have it enabled, that could be the problem.

In Vm settings its Acceleration - Paravirtualization Interface: Default. Hardware Virtualization: Enabled Nested Paging. On.
Other problem could be Intel physical videocard and i see not english Windows that is other possible source of problems..

I had DX and MS.. library already installed so i did not used these from ISO.