First post, by Nazo
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I ran across a site -- http://home.amis.net/lkslavi/dosbox.html -- a while ago purely by accident and got my hopes up, but, for some reason it doesn't work with my system. What I'm thinking is that it's designed for a Radeon (as I understand it, the original author designed it for some ATI contest or something -- I don't remember what specifically I read as it was a while ago, so that might be a bit off.)
For those who don't want to waste time looking up the model numbers, my video card, the LeadTek A400TDH is a Geforce FX 6800 (plain vanilla version.) It's MAYBE not 100% stable as I messed up something with the memory (nothing to do with the pipelines, this core could have just as easily been placed on an Ultra as it even makes it up to 433MHz stable if you supply 1.3V to it,) however, it's almost purely stable, and the only errors I ever get only happen when I've been using it for hours on end. Also, the nature of the bugs are minor annoyances. When I run DOSBox with 2xSaI enabled, my system simply reboots. And, yes, I have the automatic reboot disabled, so I can see the blue screens with the error message when something goes wrong. In other words, it's pretty bad. This has NEVER happened with anything else at all, including tougher things like Doom 3 that can actually push a card like this a bit (I run on maximum quality settings.)
The reason I blame the pixel shader code itself is because, out of curiosity, I looked up the program that the author apparently originally made with this on beyond3d or whatever that site was and tried it with the same results. I couldn't really figure out how to contact the author, and besides, this is the only project I know of actually using that code in any manner, so I'm thinking if anyone should take a look at it, it's probably the people trying to use it first in such a thing.
I can't wait for the day I can play some of my old DOS games with 2xSaI scaling done in hardware since my CPU isn't powerful enough to do some of the tougher emulation plus even bilinear scaling. Also, I can't wait until more people take on the idea of using the video card for video processing rather than the CP -- right now I only know of one other REAL project doing this, and it only does bilinear or bicubic (with only three settings) in hardware. I exclude technology demo type things that can't be used for any real purposes.
(BTW, sorry I accidentally posted this in the wrong forum at first if anyone saw that. Must have misclicked something somewhere.)
EDIT: Oh, and I'm sorry, I'd test this stuff out more, but, the only other systems I have access to are an old retro gaming system (this is why I want DOSBox for things like 2xSaI) which has an ancient (and not so great even at the time) rage pro 3D chip and a P4-2.4 (the slow kind) with a mere Radeon 9200SE, which lacks PS2.0.