Panzer Dragoon is available for PC without the need for an emulator. Not authentic Sega Saturn but close enough for me.

That would have to be one heck of a wrapper since NV1 was all kinds of oddball (well not quite Saturn level odd, but still closer than not). Honestly, I think the only way you could make it work would be to write a full on emulator for the card in conpute shaders, sort of like what parallel rdp did for the N64 graphics subsystem.

Compute could be overdoing it - a C emulation interpreter would probably be enough.

DrAnthony wrote on 2023-04-25, 01:08:

That would have to be one heck of a wrapper since NV1 was all kinds of oddball (well not quite Saturn level odd, but still closer than not). Honestly, I think the only way you could make it work would be to write a full on emulator for the card in conpute shaders, sort of like what parallel rdp did for the N64 graphics subsystem.

nVidia sure did some weird shit with that card.

d3vilsadvocate wrote on 2023-04-20, 20:35:

I'd like to play Panzer Dragoon with that 😁

What for? There's almost no visual difference.
The Edge applies some limited texture smoothing, smudging the textures and making them look worse imo:
https://youtu.be/jChtlWNIAL4?t=859
Note that in the video above he appears to be running software mode in low res, so it's not even an accurate comparison!

Proper 640x480 software mode actually looks as good as or better than with the card:
https://youtu.be/LXgaUfGbShQ?t=484
Plus you get the awesome dithering effect which is completely lost in the Edge version.

I suppose the only advantage of this card would be better framerates on real hardware with a slow CPU. In like, three or four games.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-04-25, 02:41:

DrAnthony wrote on 2023-04-25, 01:08:

That would have to be one heck of a wrapper since NV1 was all kinds of oddball (well not quite Saturn level odd, but still closer than not). Honestly, I think the only way you could make it work would be to write a full on emulator for the card in conpute shaders, sort of like what parallel rdp did for the N64 graphics subsystem.

nVidia sure did some weird shit with that card.

Indeed, and it's much harder to wrap one's mind around just why they went down the path they did than some of the other strange projects of that era. I mean say what you want about the rest of the system, at least VDP1 on the Saturn can be explained rationally. They had arcade hardware that was spinning, stretching and contorting sprites in all sorts of ways, it's easy to imagine an engineer having a drink or two thinking "Hey, if we just stitch these things together, we'd have a pretty mean texture mapped polygon engine". Of course that leads you to a forward texturing mess (which I would argue was a bigger sin than quad primitives people jump on first) but it was a series of logical decisions that lead to said mess. NV1 really has no excuse, it's like they just decided to zig when everyone else was zagging. Oh and it had a(n extremely) mediocre sound core, but don't get me started there.