I do have XvT but I honestly don't remember playing it since I started using Nvidia hardware (late 2000). If the problem's the same as X-Wing Alliance's, then I'd suggest that it

Uhmm, sorry. I tried X-Wing Alliance and just wrote 'XvT' automatically... 😊

If I remember right, pixel center is at .5 in Glide (and so for a 3Dfx card) and .0 in D3D. So, is it possible that this game was developed on a 3Dfx hw of which driver wasn't compliant to D3D in the respect of D3D rasterization rules?

Yeah, all my dabbling in IDA seems to indicate that the value in the INI is completely ignored (as with most settings, even sound sample rate, which I had to fix via patching the EXE). Is it possible to force Z-Buffering?

If I edit 'useZFlag' it always gets overwritten by 'useZFlag=1' at the next game startup.
Z-buffer usage cannot be forced as there is no way to find out when the game provides correct z-coordinates (if at all) and when it wants to draw elements that really don't require a z-buffer like HUD.

Dege wrote:

If I remember right, pixel center is at .5 in Glide (and so for a 3Dfx card) and .0 in D3D. So, is it possible that this game was developed on a 3Dfx hw of which driver wasn't compliant to D3D in the respect of D3D rasterization rules?

Yeah, that could well be it; a little digging through old threads online suggests that the problem was fixed on old ATI hardware by enabling an "alternate pixel center" compatibility option. I have a vague memory that Nvidia had a similar setting in very old drivers, but perhaps it was for OpenGL, or perhaps I'm imagining things.

Silanda wrote:

I have a vague memory that Nvidia had a similar setting in very old drivers, but perhaps it was for OpenGL, or perhaps I'm imagining things.

No, you are right, I myself remember that. Texture coordinates could also be adjusted I think, but I cannot find those options on the nVidia Control Panel now, they are probably removed.

Of course those adjustments could be done through dgVoodoo, however I don't want to expose such settings in the setup to leave it as simple as possible. (When I was browsing feedbacks on the net I found that even dgVoodoo2 was said to have a lot of options, suggesting it's hard to configure it 'correctly' (or whatever). 😵 )

Hello dege and everyone else here at VOGONS,

With dgVoodoo 2.4, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770, Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit and Midtown Madness 2 XP Compatibility Patch installed,
the game crashes when I try to use DirectDraw and, using Direct3D, the moment it tries to render a 3D model of a car at the car selection screen, where it will say it suffered a 'memory heap' error.

Try 2.41.

2.41 made no difference.

Hi!

A quick report:

I did a quick try with Midtown Madness 2 and 2.41 and indeed, it crashes at selecting "quick race" and "vehicles".
Also tried with the current wip version and it worked fine. It seems some other fixing fixed this one too. 😀
However I'm not sure if everything is OK with the game movies, I got only a black screen (and roughly the same with native DX),
but I could only got this game to launch by applying a kind of patch (otherwise it always complained about the correct CD).

Yesterday fixed a DDraw bug so WarGods software rendering now works OK, but there is a little practical problem with its hw rendering.
As mentioned in this thread

Wargods in legacy pc problem

hw scene rendering produces only a black screen. So did it with dgVoodoo. The problem undoubtedly comes from bad parameterizing of the D3D execute buffer. My guess is that this game was developed on a hw (maybe a 3Dfx again?) with a driver that implemented the execute buffer support of its own and (wrongly) discarded the parameter in question (and so it does not work if work is left to the D3D runtime).
If I discard it in dgVoodoo, it works fine.
I'm pondering what to do. Some 'bad driver' settings would be needed (like ACT for Windows) in dgVoodoo but I don't want to do such things. Or maybe alternative virtual cards to choose from with the capabilities of the real card, or...

BTW, I'm going to release the current version soon. I didn't fixed all the problems I know of but I'm going to have a very few time for dgVoodoo for a while.

I tried 2.41 with Kiss again and the menu seems really corrupted and so are the videos (16bpp->32bpp error?). though it looks fine ingame.

Dege wrote:

but I could only got this game to launch by applying a kind of patch (otherwise it always complained about the correct CD).

Blame SafeDisc. 😜

Dege wrote:

I'm pondering what to do. Some 'bad driver' settings would be needed (like ACT for Windows) in dgVoodoo but I don't want to do such things. Or maybe alternative virtual cards to choose from with the capabilities of the real card, or...

IMHO, patch the game executable itself...
P.S. There was an videocard than can work in Wargods d3d mode?

hey dege,

is there any chance you can add the ability to force/change color depth in the dx wrapper.

The reason i ask is that it appears currently it honors the applications requested screen mode, which poses a problem on Geforce 8 and higher nvidia architectures as they did away with dithering in 16bpp display modes. This results in abnormally large blobs of colour banding in games that only support 16bpp.

Radeon had this issue in the past and a hack was added to the driver to auto-promote 16bpp to 32bpp when FSAA was enabled (to fix a seperate issue, but resolved the banding too).

DXGL has already demonstrated that this is a potential fix for the issue, it just has too many other issues at present.

Edit:
mmk, i just saw this

It supports 8bit paletted textures as well as (logical) 16 bit color depths. All 3D rendering is done at 32bit because D3D11 does not support lower quality. If the rendering is done on a logically 16 bit target (Glide or D3D with a 16 bit surface) then the quality of the result is lowered to 16 bit quality except when dithering is enabled. Also, if a pointer is requested from the application for such a target to access that directly, then a true 32->16 conversion takes place done by dgVoodoo itself and vice-versa (16->32 when applying modifications done by the application).
So, the graphics driver always see 32 bit rendering while the various bit depths are virtual to the wrapped applications.

So the banding i am seeing in StarLancer must be a limitation in the wrapper presently.

is there any chance you can add the ability to force/change color depth in the dx wrapper.

It's already forced to 32 bit.

So the banding i am seeing in StarLancer must be a limitation in the wrapper presently.

There is no any limitations. I can't see banding in StarLancer with dgVoodoo. It looks great:

dgVoodoo:

Native DX:

IMHO, patch the game executable itself...
P.S. There was an videocard than can work in Wargods d3d mode?

Yes, patching seems to be the only way.
I suppose it worked at least on the one it was developed. 😀

WarGods D3D uses point-filtered texturing so it's hard to distinguish between its software and hw rendering.

I tried 2.41 with Kiss again and the menu seems really corrupted and so are the videos (16bpp->32bpp error?). though it looks fine ingame.

Could you post a screenshot plz? Last time I checked it looked ok.

I have found a bug then.

At first mission launch, the image is severely banded on the sun and nebula
if i tab out and then back in, the image is perfect.

I have a GTX 680 with 340.52 (newer drivers do not appear safe to use) running 2 monitors at 1920x1200 and 1680x1050
display drivers have been tested with stock settings.

Tested the game on both screens and the behavior remains the same.

Sadly, the screenshot i took while the issue was present, is as perfectly as the one i took while it was good. 😮, so it seems like it could be an issue when the wrapper is used with specific configs.

Pretty convinced there is a texture format issue of some sort. Radeon HD6, Omega drivers from last december

Also I tried 2.4 again and the problem occurs there as well. 😖

Obvious question: Using compatibility modes?

Dege wrote:

I did a quick try with Midtown Madness 2 and 2.41 and indeed, it crashes at selecting "quick race" and "vehicles". Also tried wi […]
Show full quote

I did a quick try with Midtown Madness 2 and 2.41 and indeed, it crashes at selecting "quick race" and "vehicles".
Also tried with the current wip version and it worked fine. It seems some other fixing fixed this one too. 😀
However I'm not sure if everything is OK with the game movies, I got only a black screen (and roughly the same with native DX),
but I could only got this game to launch by applying a kind of patch (otherwise it always complained about the correct CD).

Woo! Good to know that there is hope for Midtown Madness 2 on dgVoodoo. Intro movies played back whenever I select the Windows XP compatibility mode with Scaling for High DPI.

Must be due to the codec it uses for video.

Yes, you are right. Without compatibility fixes, Midtown Madness 2 will not find the "IV50 decompressor".

In the meantime, I got the game to work better than expected on Windows 8.1 using Application Compatibility Toolkit. However, frame rates are quite low and latency quite high.

Kiss: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child seems perfect here (Win8, Nvidia). Needed to disable some built-in ACT fixes, but none of them caused what leileilol is describing.

Kiss Psycho Circus works fine for me too.
Maybe the color converter shaders don't run properly on AMD with certain drivers? I hope not that is the case.