ACT 5.6 says:

EmulateHeap
IgnoreAltTab

I did some brief testing.

Windows 8.1, Radeon 5770 (Catalyst 14.2)

Incoming

- distorted HUD
- fps drop down (~11 fps) after the launch, but selecting some other menu item gives ~60. The framerate is capped at 30-32 fps while playing (game "feature"?)

Gruntz

- black squares on water
- in fullscreen: broken circle under the cursor, dialog windows (like options, save & load) minimize the game

Severance: Blade of Darkness

- r3Dfx Voodoo 1-2: half of the game menu is covered in black
- D3d or D3d Voodoo 3 and Banshee: choppy framerate

Post Mortem

- intro (Microids) movie puts game into the windowed mode. It can be alt-tabbed to fullscreen, though.

Divine Divinity

- direct 3d mode: somewhat slow loading and choppy framerate

@Dege: Yes, Hellbender does have support for Save Games. (Not sure about the Trial version, but I think it does too.)

The issue shows up right at the beginning of the first level of the Full Version, you literally just have to turn around and look at the radars. (It also shows on your ship in third person mode as well. The curved top of the ship gets cut off by the geometry behind it. It's as if depth in the global sense is fine, but on per-object instancing, it's backwards.)

ZellSF wrote:

ACT 5.6 says:

EmulateHeap
IgnoreAltTab

Applying these settings to the game and enabling the Windows 98/Me compatibility mode at the same time causes the game to show a black screen with the dgVoodoo logo visible after loading a level and then crash with this error:

However this test was done with the Steam version as I don't own JK on GoG.

Edit: That happens only sporadically and it doesn't always show an error message.

Firtasik wrote:

The framerate is capped at 30-32 fps while playing (game "feature"?)

feature. including the fullspeed menu framerate

though it ran more like 15-20 on a typical voodoo2 system back in the day. 30fps incoming is still too fast for me 😜

Surprisingly, Heroes of Might and Magic does not work as well as its sequel.

Heroes of Might and Magic III works, but the cursor background flickers a solid black square.

Silanda wrote:

Another quick report.

Rogue Squadron: No in depth testing here but the game appears to work in D3D mode, with one snag. The launcher does not recognize D3D modes as available if dgVoodoo is used. The mode has to be selected and the dgVoodoo files added afterwards.

I was mistaken, sort of. After a quick play it seems that the game will crash after each mission. This happens in D3D or Glide mode. A little research suggests that the game generally has this problem on Windows XP and later. There's supposed to be a hex edit fix but it doesn't work properly for me unless I'm using native D3D at 640x480, and the only other solution is to use Nglide 1.02, which must have some kind of workaround. DgVoodoo will crash in both Glide or D3D mode.

This was tested on the rerelease CD version (1.3?) rather than the new GOG version.

EDIT: Correction, I now believe dgVoodoo isn't working in D3D at all with this game. I forgot that I had Nglide installed, and despite the game being set to use D3D it was using Glide instead.

Silanda wrote:

This happens in D3D or Glide mode. A little research suggests that the game generally has this problem on Windows XP and later. There's supposed to be a hex edit fix but it doesn't work properly for me unless I'm using native D3D at 640x480, and the only other solution is to use Nglide 1.02, which must have some kind of workaround.

You are wrong. The glide renderer works ok with a real Voodoo2, no crash. Only d3d renderer is affected.

Gamecollector wrote:

Silanda wrote:

This happens in D3D or Glide mode. A little research suggests that the game generally has this problem on Windows XP and later. There's supposed to be a hex edit fix but it doesn't work properly for me unless I'm using native D3D at 640x480, and the only other solution is to use Nglide 1.02, which must have some kind of workaround.

You are wrong. The glide renderer works ok with a real Voodoo2, no crash. Only d3d renderer is affected.

Yeah, it probably did. That doesn't mean that the game isn't doing something that modern operating systems/drivers don't like. Whatever the case, it crashes dgVoodoo, it crashes Nglide 1.03, and it crashes in D3D, all at the same points.

teleguy wrote:

Update:
I just noticed that the main game of XvT seems to work completely fine (dgvoodoo even fixes most of the issues the game has when enabling 3D mode), it's only the addon (Balance of Power) that crashes all the time.

There are even training missions that are exactly the same in both games and the mission runs without problem in XvT but crashes immediately in BoP.

Did you install dgVoodoo into the BoP folder? Remember that it lives in its own folder separate from XvT, so you'll need to put the files next to both of them

Yes, I put the files into the BoP folder.

There's also an issue with the main game XvT.

If you use the launcher to launch the game dgVoodoo only shows a black screen unless you disable the intro movie. Currently dgvoodoo is the only way to have working AA in the main game.

Is there any chance to run XvT without a joystick? If not then I have to get a cheap one to test it myself.

I've fixed rendering of Lands of Lore 2 for both sw and hw mode. However it always crashes when losing focus and it does that with native DX too. 🙁

It also revealed that lighting was based on a little misconcept in dgVoodoo so I've refactored that and it fixed Bridge Commander and a certain scene in Tomb Raider 4 (altough still there is a little issue with BC as for the inner display of spaceship).

Fog was disabled in DX3 for some reason. I've enabled all renderstates mentioned in the DX2 SDK so I hope it fixes Shadows of Empire.

Three other issues I've encountered:
- There are games locking the rendering buffer frequently so the fps can drop below 60. A solution similar to 'true PCI access' in Glide would be needed for such cases. This issue can be checked against by checking if fps drops more as higher resolutions are used.
- Lands of Lore 2 menu screens write directly to the primary surface all the time so some flashing occurs. Not so disturbing but a completely new rendering techinque would be needed in the emulation to fix that.
- I experienced a conflict between dgVoodoo and quartz.dll (video playing), as Teleguy also mentioned. Don't yet know its reason.

I did some tests on Hellbender (full version): right, rendering the radars are not correct, it shows polygon sort problems but I get the same with native DX. Interestingly this game does not use z-buffer in spite of there is a line 'useZFlag=1' in its config file (Hellbend.ini).

I think most of the X-Wing games can be played with mouse and/or keyboard, but that it's not worth doing because the experience is terrible compared to using a joystick.

No, XvT not runs w/o a joystick.

Dege wrote:

Is there any chance to run XvT without a joystick? If not then I have to get a cheap one to test it myself.

Vjoy should get you past the joystick check.
http://vjoystick.sourceforge.net/site/

There are also several applications that let you control your craft with the mouse.
http://www.gog.com/forum/star_wars_tie_fighte … wrote_a_program

Thanks, vJoy works!!

So, by a quick try, XvT seems to work fine for me, except:
- Flashing background with sw rendering
- Badly aligned text; don't know what to do with that, the wrapper works according to the rasterization rules of old DX (like native nVidia drivers, I got the same with it)
Did it work right with old hardware?

Dege wrote:

- Badly aligned text; don't know what to do with that, the wrapper works according to the rasterization rules of old DX (like native nVidia drivers, I got the same with it)
Did it work right with old hardware?

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 worked on some old hardware. On that game, the text alignment problems have been present on Nvidia hardware for at least 12 years. Both games used to work properly on my Voodoo 3, and my suspicion was always that they were designed to work well with the Voodoo D3D drivers of the time, rather than being programmed to the D3D specifications.

Dege wrote:

I did some tests on Hellbender (full version): right, rendering the radars are not correct, it shows polygon sort problems but I get the same with native DX. Interestingly this game does not use z-buffer in spite of there is a line 'useZFlag=1' in its config file (Hellbend.ini).

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?

Dege wrote:

Thanks, vJoy works!! […]
Show full quote

Thanks, vJoy works!!

So, by a quick try, XvT seems to work fine for me, except:
- Flashing background with sw rendering
- Badly aligned text; don't know what to do with that, the wrapper works according to the rasterization rules of old DX (like native nVidia drivers, I got the same with it)
Did it work right with old hardware?

I'm using the GOG release, that probably makes a difference.

On the plus side I didn't notice anything off about the text.