there is gl direct (dont know if it works with nwn)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gldirect/

Are you affected by the ati opegl firmware bug ?
https://fixthe200m.wordpress.com/about/

I was going to suggest QindieGL, which I saw mentioned along with Neverwinter Nights recently.

Turns out it was a bad mention.

Re: The Wrapper Collection Project

The "Wrapper Collection Project" thread is mine, and yeah, I need to update it and release the results. It's gonna be a bit of work tho...

Ah, good to hear that it's not completely dead anyway, 🤣. It's surprisingly hard to find this sort of thing though. For one thing, it's almost universally the other way... I search "opengl to direct3d wrapper" and get tons of Direct3D to OpenGL wrappers. Even if I use quotes. 😒 I don't like that some like TitaniumGL are commercial only too. For something with such a long way to go, it seems they jumped the gun a little... People are posting the SciTech one and serial numbers for it since it's completely abandoned with the company dying and all, but I couldn't even get it to run (immediate error about being unable to register a file or something. I'm guessing it's intended for Windows 9x or at least much earlier versions of Windows than the 7 that I'm currently running.)

I do dream of some day where a legacy Windows gaming capable emulation software exists. Hopefully the future of Dosbox-X. Such a long way away though. Meanwhile older Windows games work less and less with more and more issues. I guess people won't truly recognize the problem until a good large number of them are outright unplayable on modern systems even with tweaks and tricks. In the meantime, I think wrappers often do a good job of bridging the gap.

Davros wrote:

there is gl direct (dont know if it works with nwn)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gldirect/

Guess there's one sure way to find out. I'll give it a look later today when I can.

Are you affected by the ati opegl firmware bug ?
https://fixthe200m.wordpress.com/about/

No. Just drivers made by people that don't give a crap about older games. Well... To be fair, the game itself probably uses shortcuts and tricks it shouldn't be using from what I understand, but when I first played it I played it with a Radeon 9600 Pro and it was pretty ok with all the effects on. I think the worst problems came with an update to the game actually, but later on I had an X850XT-PE and even with shaders off the game could bring that videocard to its knees. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but for its time that thing was probably the most powerful card in the market. (I was still on AGP and didn't want to change every single component to go to PCI-E, so went with that to buy myself some time.)

pcem is the closest so far although you'll need a powerful computer to emulate even a p200. The developer mentioned that for the forseeable future a p3-600 will probably be the max so you're SOL as far as that goes.

I've never had an issue with NWN but I haven't touched it since the last expansion came out.

Isn't there a Linux ver of NWN?

DosFreak wrote:

I've never had an issue with NWN but I haven't touched it since the last expansion came out.

The biggest issues were introduced with a later patch as I recall. And if you turn off pixel shaders for the most part it runs decently -- though still not as well as it should by far given the difference in hardware then compared to hardware now...

Isn't there a Linux ver of NWN?

Yes. And it's dynamically linked against really ancient libraries, so it's so hard to get working well that most people recommend using WINE with the Windows version.

What about the GOG release? Do they do anything special to it?

IIRC NWN's bump effect for the water uses Nvidia-exclusive extensions and never worked at all on Radeons. It's also unlikely PCem will emulate the Geforce3-minimum card required for the effect.

I had a feeling it was something like that. Still, before whichever patch made things so horrible, it actually ran tolerably on a Radeon 9600 Pro. Not ideally and sometimes framerates could drop low enough to make the game crash (yeah, it crashes if the framerate gets too low. Lovely) but overall amazingly well for a midrange at best videocard. Perhaps there were some effects outright disabled on ATi cards, but I do know it did do shaders on that 9600 Pro. Water works and I think maybe I had even used it with the cloaks that came later (not sure about the later edge of the game's life. I had a nVidia videocard in between the 9600 Pro and the X850XT-PE.)

clueless1 wrote:

What about the GOG release? Do they do anything special to it?

Nothing. You just get the Diamond Edition as-is with the latest patch applied. But if there were some sort of third party patch or something I'd just apply it manually myself. Sadly, there is no easy solution here. Most just turn off the shaders and get by. And I won't claim the game is like Morrowind with shaders or something. I just don't like that I can't even get it to do what it did back then no matter what I do (short of building an old machine with a 9800 Pro and old drivers using money I don't have and space I can't really spare.)