Do you have decent cooling? Sinistar is an alphablend abuser, dunno if it's making the Riva upset from that.

which reminds me - i should try sinistar on pcx2

Well, I think the cooling is fine. The PC is a dust magnet, but I think I've managed to get it clean enough for decent circulation. The game always freezes at exact moments, which are the instant you choose the config menu or the instant you go ingame where only one 3D frame is displayed, then nothing but the mouse cursor and CD/DVD drive respond.

I tried using the patch found online, but that didn't work either.

Try lowering the hardware acceleration slider in display properties.

This is the last version of DirectX that will install on Windows 98:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=353

I have tried several OGL games with my riva128... using the latest drivers you can get from nvidia , the card did not gave me any probs at all!
I have attached a heatsink/fan on the riva128 chip though, it is way too hot for my taste

Make sure to apply the game patch:

http://www.patches-scrolls.de/
http://www.fileplanet.com/32079/30000/fileinf … istar-Unleashed

Still not working. I tried the demo version, but that showed me some heavy gfx corruption before freezing. My assumption is that mipmapping was enabled. Games like Re-Volt start bugging out when mipmapping is enabled. Doesn't make sense why because mipmapping is just a form of texture antialiasing using sub images, and shouldn't cause garbage primitives to be rendered on the screen.

Sune Salminen wrote:

Try lowering the hardware acceleration slider in display properties.

This is the last version of DirectX that will install on Windows 98:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=353

Doesn't that only apply to Direct3D 8 and later there?

keropi wrote:

I have tried several OGL games with my riva128... using the latest drivers you can get from nvidia , the card did not gave me any probs at all!
I have attached a heatsink/fan on the riva128 chip though, it is way too hot for my taste

Mine has a heatsink on it, but it's a rather poorly designed one that was originally on the card.

akula65 wrote:

Make sure to apply the game patch:

http://www.patches-scrolls.de/
http://www.fileplanet.com/32079/30000/fileinf … istar-Unleashed

Thanks, but I mentioned in my second post that I already tried it. 🙁

riva128 was a card for pentium I not III.
check whether the game works on any other that old 3d accelerator first, as voodoo 3 matches riva tnt2 not 128.

Not quite - Riva 128 was a 1997 product that came in a zillion Pentium II boxes. 😉 Its speed is similar to a 3Dfx Voodoo1 and Matrox G200.

However, Riva 128 has some issues. Its texture filtering shows dithering artifacts (grainy/noisy) and this is actually similar to what I've seen with the Virge chips. It has problems with textures not aligning properly resulting in visible seams. It also has problems with texture memory thrashing and can stutter annoyingly in some games (high resolutions exacerbate this).

Don't forget the square texture restriction, resulting in resampled-upward textures from rectangulars. Also, the multiply blend is very low precision, so anything using lightmaps = looks like crap.

Interesting it's more compatible with Q3-based games than Unreal though

swaaye wrote:

Not quite - Riva 128 was a 1997 product that came in a zillion Pentium II boxes. 😉 .

Yeah, how to sell cheapest Pentium7 computers? Sell them together with with 1kB RAM and 1D gfx card. Why is it slow? You should have bought Pentium8.

swaaye wrote:

Its speed is similar to a 3Dfx Voodoo1

Voodoo1 is definitelly not Voodoo3.

I got my dual monitor setup working and the game runs fine on my Voodoo3. So at this point, I guess it's fine not to worry about it.

The only thing I find annoying about the Riva128 was the buggy texture support. The card runs Gunman Chronicles nicely but sometimes the textures will flicker. The drivers were never too great, but once I installed ASPI, OpenGL stopped locking up my PC. If you think that's bad, you'd be surprised to find out that the Riva128 doesn't support certain blending modes since the card was specifically designed to conform to the Direct3D 3.0 and 5.0 specifications.

But one thing I REALLY like about the Riva128 is it's context management. It's really more advanced than 3Dfx Voodoo 3's, but in a way, it's a bit overly complicated. The advantage is that the Riva128's registers have no "fixed" address like Voodoo3's making it easier to manage multiple windows (from what I've read and studied on the hardware level myself).

Each card has it's fair share of ups and downs. The Voodoo3 generally runs faster with less bugs, but the Riva128's lighting model is more realistic (I never liked 3Dfx's lighting model). In most cases, games just run slightly better on the Voodoo3, but at the same time, there are games and other apps that run better on the Riva128. Surprisingly, OpenGL generally runs faster on my Riva128.

I did a comparison on the games/3D apps I own to see which is better for which:

1. Aliens versus Predator Gold
- Riva128: Slower, missing blending modes and bogus alpha testing, but the lighting is more realistic (to me).
- Voodoo3: Faster and so far the only card that shows the crosshair properly that I've seen to date, but the game is a little brighter than what I prefer.

2. Sinistar Unleashed
- Riva128: Freezes ingame
- Voodoo 3: Runs fine, but with some faint grey vertical lines and lots more aliasing.

3. Axy Snake
- Riva128: Runs the game flawlessly, minus a few polygon seams and extremely minor z-fighting. Framerates are perfect.
- Voodoo3: Runs fine, but mipmaps look ugly.

4. Please the Cookie Thing
- Riva128: Runs great when the OpenGL drivers are working with some barely noticable z-fighting.
- Voodoo3: Runs horribly slow! Doesn't look nearly as good IIRC.

5. Frogger
- Riva128: Runs okay with the exception of alpha blending bugs.
- Voodoo3: Flawless with Glide.

6. SGI OpenGL demos
- Riva128: Most runs fine without problems
- Voodoo3: Much less compatible and not nearly as fast.

7. Gunman Chronicles:
- Riva128: Runs good, but textures tend to flicker in some scenes and looks dithered.
- Voodoo3: Runs faster, and the lighting is brighter. Frame rates are generally the same.

8. Galactic Patrol:
- Riva128: Runs great with really high framerates.
- Voodoo3: Same as above, but a little slower (so far).

9. Blackhawk Striker I
- Riva128: Perfect except for missing blending modes
- Voodoo3: Perfect.

10. Quake (OpenGL)
- Riva128: Couldn't get it to run properly
- Voodoo3: Same as above, but not even the 3Dfx OpenGL driver .dll worked properly!

11. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
- Riva128: Ran it surprisingly well, but only a few missing alphablending modes.
- Voodoo3: Ran a bit faster without the blending bugs, but the textures were less realistic IMO. Blending aside, I'd rather use the Riva128 for this one.

I've got more games, but haven't done any comparisons on them yet. In spite of it's limitations and buggy drivers, it still competes well in certain areas. In most cases the Voodoo3 outperforms it, but in other cases, the Riva128 demolishes the Voodoo3, especially in the OpenGL department. From a random article I read on the performance and quality of cards running Turok, the Voodoo card did the best, but the Riva128 also did a much better job than all of the other competitors.

So don't be hatin' on my Riva128 y'all. 😀 Love that card...

Odd. I could get Quake GL to run under a Riva128 and a Voodoo2 back in the late 90's. Both worked perfectly. For the Riva128 I was using Diamond Multimedia's drivers at the time. They tended to work better. I hope that I can still find them so I can post here.

Yeah, try running Unreal Tournament on the Riva128. Oh wait, YOU CANT! OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

(actually you can through the Direct3D driver, but anything additive will appear as a low precision multiplicative blended black box)

And all the 'realistic' lighting you speak of are all just 15-bit precision banding artifacts. You could probably write some HLSL or GLSL to 'rivafy' everything

I remember Riva128 improving dramatically over its life because of NV's driver efforts. For example, they added per pixel mip mapping. And yes their OpenGL driver was on its way to being the best around.

But ya there were insurmountable hardware limitations.

filipetolhuizen wrote:

Odd. I could get Quake GL to run under a Riva128 and a Voodoo2 back in the late 90's. Both worked perfectly. For the Riva128 I was using Diamond Multimedia's drivers at the time. They tended to work better. I hope that I can still find them so I can post here.

I have the feeling that the problems are related to some of my other hardware in my PC. For instance, with 3Dfx Glide, some games don't initialize properly as well as the glide3x examples from the SDK for windows. In order for them to work properly, I have to pass in the window handle where previously it wasn't needed. When I had my Dell XPS T450 (Pentium III 450Mhz), this was never a problem. Also, the 3Dfx OpenG32.dll never once failed to run on any OpenGL application on that PC using the same card. On my Dell B1000r, it only works on GLQuake.

Btw, I managed to fix GLQuake by tweaking the resolution settings a bit. Works on the Voodoo3, but still not on the Riva128.

leileilol wrote:

Yeah, try running Unreal Tournament on the Riva128. Oh wait, YOU CANT! OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

(actually you can through the Direct3D driver, but anything additive will appear as a low precision multiplicative blended black box)

IIRC there's a special patch of some sort for riva128. I downloaded it, but can't remember what I did with it and haven't found it since. If I find it, I'll let you know how it works.

leileilol wrote:

And all the 'realistic' lighting you speak of are all just 15-bit precision banding artifacts. You could probably write some HLSL or GLSL to 'rivafy' everything

Banding artifacts? I never said they were "realistic", but looked more realistic than 3Dfx's did. AvP and other games that shouldn't be are just too damn bright on early Voodoo cards. Riva128 does AvP's lighting just right.

blueshogun96 wrote:

AvP and other games that shouldn't be are just too damn bright on early Voodoo cards.

All old Voodoos had a high default gamma, going from 1.7 to 1.2. Kind of ridiculous, but made sense for stuff like GLQuake that had no color control at all (enter TNT-era "GLQuake's too dark" complaints here, and the creation of that hacky idgamma tool). Combine that default gamma with the DAC filter of the Voodoo1/2, the unsynced 60hz, and the splash screen you'll have this weird distinctive "Voodoo" feel that was unique only to 3dfx hardware.

therefore everything that isn't 3dfx is 'proper'