Orka Borka wrote:

Probably silly and definitely OT question: […]
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Probably silly and definitely OT question:

Any hope in seeing this reworked in some way as a virtual videocard driver or implemented inside an emulator supporting windows 95/98?

In other words,could it be used to overcome the problems shown on some hardware accelerated games pre-directx 8 ( usually console ports ala Final Fantasy VII/VIII, Sega Rally 2, Metal gear Solid, Winpeout XL or most games using 8-bit Palettized textures ) with modern videocards and most modern operating system? Or just some of the essential voodoo hw calls / instructions are going to be emulated?

I mean, this could be a great solution; right now under Windows 7 64bit some 16 bit executables are not even recognized anymore. And if you are "lucky" enough, your game is usually going to require "just" 3 fan-made patches and a CPU slower utility 😒

I believe some people have managed to get Win95 running under DOSBox (possibly requiring special DOSBox builds), so it's possible that once the 3dfx emulation is far enough along you may be able to install Win95 in DOSBox and load 3dfx drivers inside of it.

Some of those older games run okay under Linux+Wine with lots of badgering. I wish they'd do a real Windows port of Wine for running 16-bit and Win9x games under Vista/Win7 x64, but I think in a few years things are all going to converge enough that we'll have multiple choices for running those games. In the mean time I have tons of older and newer ones to keep me occupied 😜

Orka Borka wrote:

Probably silly and definitely OT question: […]
Show full quote

Probably silly and definitely OT question:

Any hope in seeing this reworked in some way as a virtual videocard driver or implemented inside an emulator supporting windows 95/98?

In other words,could it be used to overcome the problems shown on some hardware accelerated games pre-directx 8 ( usually console ports ala Final Fantasy VII/VIII, Sega Rally 2, Metal gear Solid, Winpeout XL or most games using 8-bit Palettized textures ) with modern videocards and most modern operating system? Or just some of the essential voodoo hw calls / instructions are going to be emulated?

I mean, this could be a great solution; right now under Windows 7 64bit some 16 bit executables are not even recognized anymore. And if you are "lucky" enough, your game is usually going to require "just" 3 fan-made patches and a CPU slower utility 😒

Right Now the Voodoo emulated card is properly detected under Windows 95, but still, it works really slow right now, it isn't playable yet.

This is an astonishing development in the emulation of old win9x games. 😁 I can't wait for it to be finished so that I can give it a try. 😁

@Orka Bora :
Why not use a Win9x/WinXP Virtual machine (with VPC 2007, or Windows Virtual PC, or even VirtualBox) ?

For Windows XP, VirtualBox is also a solution (and VirtualBox's guest additions can add some D3D support, along with DirectDraw acceleration).

If you're CPU supports hardware virtualisation, then Windows Virtual PC is the way to go.

With guest addiitions installed (whether you're using VirtualBox or one of MS' virtualisation softwares), the emulated GPU (a S3 Trio 64) has 8 MB of VRAM, wich makes games like DiscWorld Noir (wich uses 3D characters on 2D backgrounds) fully playable (and you can disable mouse integration, to play fullscreen games without any hassle).

Rarely, some other games (like Broken Sword 2) need the guest additions to be removed (and only works with Win98, wich VirtualBox doesn't like, unlike VPC 2007 or Windows VPC. And VPC can't install it's guest additions on Win95 either. But WinME works too for MS' virtualisation softwares, even if it's not listed when you create a new virtual machine), so be warned.

I don't know if it would work with MGS 1 or Tomb Raider (early full-3D games), but it's worth a try! All you need is to download the virtualisation software, and an old Win9X/WinXP CD/ISO to mount and install. 😀

If you need to create an ISO to install something on the virtual machine, Infrarecorder can do it (or you can used shared directories if the virtual machine additions are installed).

PS : Sorry for this off-topic post. Maybe a splitted thread would be possible ?

xcomcmdr wrote:

@Orka Bora :
Why not use a Win9x/WinXP Virtual machine (with VPC 2007, or Windows Virtual PC, or even VirtualBox) ?

For Windows XP, VirtualBox is also a solution (and VirtualBox's guest additions can add some D3D support, along with DirectDraw acceleration).

Any of these VM doesn't support 3dHardware acceleration when Win9x is a guest system. Only VMWare with XP as guest system has 3D hardware acceleration support. VirtualBox is SLOW, when you install Win9x. VirtualPC hasn't joystick support - >no games, which requires joystick (for example flight/space simulators).

True, but even early 3D games (tested : Resident Evil 1, Discworld Noir) work fine with VirtualPC 2007 + Win98SE + VM additions (but VM additions are not supported for Windows 95, even with Virtual PC).

It would be cool if someone added the 3dfx emulation to virtualbox or some other virtualization program, but it would still be slow. Multithreading the 3dfx emulation as MAME does is probably best overall solution. It provides fairly good speed and excellent compatibility.

xcomcmdr wrote:

(but VM additions are not supported for Windows 95, even with Virtual PC).

Wrong. I have Win95 under VMWare with SVGA emulation (part of VMadditions)

Someone please split this...

I'm following the both wine and Virtualization solutions for retrogaming purpose, and both of them are inadequate or with no direct interest in it:

wine, being a translation layer, has the same technical problem of windows when using a modern videocard with 8 bit textures or running a 16 bit windows executables (or 32 bit apps resorting to architecture specifc hacks) with a 64bit distro (even when using 32 bit wine executables).And in any case directx versions < 8 (i.e. fixed pipeline rendering paths ) are severely underimplemented.

Virtualbox / VirtualPc / Parallels / Vmware and similar virtualization products are definitely more oriented into supporting productivity and office software, where most of the 3D acceleration features are using a solution similar to VMGL (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~andreslc/xen-gl/ ) plus some wined3d dlls compiled under windows. (I'm not sure, maybe VMware is trying a slightly different approach but with no particular different results.) Which is completely reasonable considering that their main targets are AutoCAD and 3DS Max, not the Glide version of Need For Speed II Special Edition 😜

As far as I know, this is the first time I see such pseudo-LLE approach used for general computer videocards.

Anyway, we'ere on really OT territory here. Sorry for bringing such discussion on a development thread.

OSH wrote:

xcomcmdr wrote:

(but VM additions are not supported for Windows 95, even with Virtual PC).

Wrong. I have Win95 under VMWare with SVGA emulation (part of VMadditions)

I was talking about MS Virtual PC and VirtualBox.

Sorry about the misunderstanding.

PS : Indeed a splitting would be nice (sorry about my/those posts which have nothing to do with 3dfx chip emulation! 😒)

Topic split.

Orka: you now own the thread and can change the title if you like.

Fellow moderators: you can move this thread to another section if you feel it belongs there; I decided to be lazy and leave it in DOSBox Dev for now since that's where it came from.

Orka Borka wrote:

wine, being a translation layer, has the same technical problem of windows when using a modern videocard with 8 bit textures or running a 16 bit windows executables (or 32 bit apps resorting to architecture specifc hacks) with a 64bit distro (even when using 32 bit wine executables).And in any case directx versions < 8 (i.e. fixed pipeline rendering paths ) are severely underimplemented.

Wine runs 16-bit apps on 64-bit Linux just fine. You must be on Mac, as I believe that problem exists there for some reason relating to having to use Apple's mediocre dev kits to compile. I got bit by this when trying to set up Baldur's Gate on my wife's Macbook Pro because it has a 16-bit Windows installer despite being a 32-bit Win9x game; I had to copy over the working install that I had already got working on my laptop's 64-bit Ubuntu Linux partition.

Right on the spot. I actually met this problem some time ago, but in a totally opposite situation ( asking to wine developer what to do for a totally different problem, them pointing me to dosbox):

http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=4183

On a iMac with an ATI 5670:

Windows 7 64 bit home premium: theoretically only 16 bit protected mode (but most 16 bit installers don't work anyway), video card /directx not -supported by most the "pre-Direct X 7" games.

Ubuntu 10.10: theorically 16 bit protected mode, installers should work but they crash most of the time. same condition as Win 7 for most of the 3D Games, some notable exception (P.O.D. using glide wrapper, other similar situations ) where compatibility is higher than Windows.

Snow Leopard 10.6.4: Same as ubuntu (using wine), no 16 bit at all.

And from what I've read, 16 bit real mode is impossible on 64 bit architecture anyway.

Apart from software mode under Vmware / windows 98 and software mode there is very little to do to solve the situation 😒

Some games (for example Jane's IAF) doesn't work under XP properly, because they requires 3DFX and Win9x. The only solve is to write such 3dfx emulator as keeko is writing..

By the way, while reading this : http://www.x.org/wiki/GalliumStatus it seems that vmware supports 3d acceleration by using a custom mesa driver (which is part of Gallium ).

Should be interesting to see if it's could be compiled to run under windows 98 inside vmware. In that case OpenGL and Glide (thorugh wrapper ) should be theorically possible. A lot of "if"s, unfortunately.

EDIT: yeah, sure thing: