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EF2000 won't work. Not unless somebody writes a complete voodoo hardware emulation.

gulikoza wrote:

EF2000 won't work. Not unless somebody writes a complete voodoo hardware emulation.

i'd love to see that. Slow and hard to do but someone's got to preserve the bad voodoo rendering habits of line dithering and blurry hardware mipmapping before the mists of time kill all the voodoo cards on the planet.

mame has a full hardware implementation of 3dfx chip.
good luck 😀

mame has a full hardware implementation of 3dfx chip

You mean software implementation, I hope.

JAL

Well he means a full-hardware software implementation 😀
Anybody tried it?

I'm no MAME dev guru, but AFAIK, MAME doesn't use 3D hardware acceleration at all, which means one needs a _very_ beefy machine to run demanding 3D games. I'm not sure why MAME is developed that way, but i think it's part of the basic set of MAME philosophies ("preservation before playability").

The DOSBox 3DFX emulation is much more "usable" for the casual user, as it does use 3D hardware acceleration. If i got that right, DOSBox acts more like a wrapper/mapper than a "real" emulator in that respect.

The real question is: is it possible to improve the current GLIDE emulation? Reading Gulizoka's comment, it seems that might be a problem...

Of course it doesn't use 3D acceleration...I'd be surprised if it would. Writing an emulation like that would require mapping low level hardware calls (the ones game sends to the emulated card) to opengl/direct3d high level calls.
Dosbox "emulation" simply forwards high level glide calls to the host system, where they are handled by a wrapper. For that to work, you have to replace DOS glide library (glide2x.ovl) with one that is dosbox aware. Some games are statically linked with glide library and are directly communicating with the voodoo board, so they don't work with the current emulation. If somebody wants to write a true emulation, bug wd to add PCI bus to DOSBox, I have a feeling it won't work otherwise 😉

I should have some alpha pci bus code I wrote ages ago... I'll try to find it.
(I really loved to play ef2000 in dosbox with 3dfx emulation)

Got some non-alpha pci code, but guess gulikoza was just kidding.
It might be a really huge task to implement 3dfx card emulation,
pci stuff is the tiniest part of it for sure.

well i have unistall the 3dfx version and install one Dos vertion that was inside the taccom folder and it works fine not a fancy grapihcs but i am interesting in the campaing of the game i could live with those graphics.