Which Radeon? The original? It should work ok, but it does lack some older features like fog table and W-buffering. At least it does unless you delve into some annoying registry tweaking and old driver experimentation (read: time consuming annoyances and no guarantees).

I suggest finding a Voodoo3, 4 or 5 instead.

Actually I was refering to newer ones from the 9200 to the HD4xxx.

haven't had a problem with my hd3 series card with old games, though it does freak out in 16bpp on older GL games

I wouldn't use a Voodoo3 in a modern system. The voltages would make the card go nuts.

I've heard that newer ATI cards seem to fare better that newer nVidia cards in some older games like Baldur's Gate. I'm planning to build a new system soon with one of the new ATI HD5xxx series cards and am hoping it will save me from doing some tweaking that I have to do to get them to run decently on my current nVidia-based laptop system.

I think I had a Radeon 9800Pro a couple desktops ago and didn't remember having problems with older games on it, but it's been a while so my memory may be foggy.

I'm playing through Baldur's Gate 1/2 (wit Big World Project) right now on Windows 7 64bit with my ATI 4890.

Of course you can't use acceleration in the game since that's always been buggy but basic 2D works as well as always.

On modern nVidia cards, you get horrible black box artifacts in most Infinity Engine games unless you use various hacks to disable hardware DDraw acceleration: http://www.shsforums.net/index.php?showtopic=30840

WARNING 😳 You don't want to use anything newer than a X1900 in games that only support 16-bit color. The newer cards don't support dithering of lower color depths and that means serious ugly unless you enjoy rainbow banding in all of your textures.

It's the same with NVIDIA cards newer than 7900.

leileilol wrote:

I wouldn't use a Voodoo3 in a modern system. The voltages would make the card go nuts.

Tru dat. Unless it's PCI.

swaaye wrote:

leileilol wrote:

I wouldn't use a Voodoo3 in a modern system. The voltages would make the card go nuts.

Tru dat. Unless it's PCI.

Yeppers, this is why I cobbled together a purpose built box that runs MS-DOS6.22, Win98-SE and Win2K using a VooDoo 5, 5500, PCI card.

The old Celeron 2.4GHz makes it a screamer box but it seems to play those older games just fine 😁

Now I have to get that 3.5"/5.25" Combo Floppy Drive working...

HunterZ wrote:

On modern nVidia cards, you get horrible black box artifacts in most Infinity Engine games unless you use various hacks to disable hardware DDraw acceleration: http://www.shsforums.net/index.php?showtopic=30840

How much newer? I have a 7950GT in one of my pcs and have had no problems. So I guess you mean anything 8XXX and up.

As far as ATI cards go. I've used 7000 (pci), 9250 (pci), X1550 (pci-e) and HD3450 (pci-e) cards (all in various XP machines) with no ill effects in DX5/6 games.

olemogamer wrote:

As far as ATI cards go. I've used 7000 (pci), 9250 (pci), X1550 (pci-e) and HD3450 (pci-e) cards (all in various XP machines) with no ill effects in DX5/6 games.

Try Shadows of the Empire. 😀 It uses table fog and the game looks completely off if the drivers can't do that. There's also the pixel center variability between vendors that causes in-game text to get jagged/ugly. X-Wing Alliance also comes to mind for this one. Of the cards I have tried only the Voodoos would put out proper images from SotE and I'm sure that's a combination of bugs and LucasArts being vendor partial at that time.

Aside from a lack of 16-bit color dithering, the HD2xxx and newer Radeons also don't work right with Jedi Knight 1 (DX5 game.) Neither do the GeForce 8+ cards. Rendering is completely messed up and you have to run in software mode.

Ah yeah Jedi Knight 1. I got black boxes in the movies on my nVidia setup too, but the 3D rendering seemed fine.

We're entering a blackout period where most DOS and Win3.1 games run great in emulators, but many hardware-accelerated Win9x games are starting to have issues running natively in newer versions of Windows and/or on newer hardware.

I'm hoping that in the next 5-10 years we'll see things like either DOSBox or Windows ports of WINE that can run the older Win9x games well.

Edit: Just stopped by the Steam forums to see if they've figured out anything since the Steam release, and apparently there's a ddraw wrapper available that people are saying helps for both ATI and nVidia: http://www.jkhub.net/project/show.php?projid= … ction=downloads

Thank you all so much! There's a mega-stutter bug on Geforce 8000 and up on most DX 5 and 6 games (JK is not affected). Here is a list of the games affected:
Falcon 4.0
Gpolice
International Rally Championship
Jane's USAF
MDK
Monster Truck Madness 1 & 2
Motorhead
Turok 2: Seeds of Evil
Virtual Pool 2 Hall

There may be others but these are the ones that I got. I'd appreciate if someone could test them on a Radeon card.

swaaye wrote:

olemogamer wrote:

As far as ATI cards go. I've used 7000 (pci), 9250 (pci), X1550 (pci-e) and HD3450 (pci-e) cards (all in various XP machines) with no ill effects in DX5/6 games.

Try Shadows of the Empire. 😀 It uses table fog and the game looks completely off if the drivers can't do that. There's also the pixel center variability between vendors that causes in-game text to get jagged/ugly. X-Wing Alliance also comes to mind for this one. Of the cards I have tried only the Voodoos would put out proper images from SotE and I'm sure that's a combination of bugs and LucasArts being vendor partial at that time.

Aside from a lack of 16-bit color dithering, the HD2xxx and newer Radeons also don't work right with Jedi Knight 1 (DX5 game.) Neither do the GeForce 8+ cards. Rendering is completely messed up and you have to run in software mode.

But this sounds like more of a problem with Lucasarts and not with DX5/6.

It's a problem with new cards not supporting DX5/6 features. Table Fog in particular was problematic beginning way back in 2000, I recall. Some of the card vendors emulated it for a while but even then it was problematic and it has been a long time since they really cared about those old games.

Also, I tried out JK1 on my notebook with a Radeon 3450 and it ran fine in XP 32-bit. Color banding in textures is quite prevalent due to the lack of dithering, however. I don't know about modern NVIDIA cards but my 8800GTX couldn't run the game right at all. The whole screen would "smear" into a mess when I moved around in the game. I've heard conflicting reports on this though.

JK is fixed with Forceware 177.xx and newer on the 8800 GTX. Has anyone tested the games above on Radeon cards?

I just said in my post that I ran it on a HD 3450 and it worked fine. In XP anyway. But the color banding is there due to the 16-bit color depth and no dithering. It's not a huge issue because the textures are so low fidelity anyway.

I'm pretty sure that the game doesn't like Vista/7. And the CD installer won't run on a 64-bit OS so you need to get around that too.

Which one from the list?

Oh, nevermind. For some reason I thought you were asking about JK. I have Motorhead and MDK though so I could try those out later.