Oh yeah, but that means I'm gonna have to reinstall Windows 98. Well, it was worth installing XP for the music.

But now, I have a different plan. Did you know that Half-Life 2 can run in DirectX 6? You can actually do it by adding -dxlevel 60 to the command line or doing mat_dxlevel 60 I think in the console. If the Voodoo 2 is really only made to go up to DirectX 6, this may be my last chance.

CrazyCritic89 wrote on 2020-09-19, 07:26:

But now, I have a different plan. Did you know that Half-Life 2 can run in DirectX 6? You can actually do it by adding -dxlevel 60 to the command line or doing mat_dxlevel 60 I think in the console. If the Voodoo 2 is really only made to go up to DirectX 6, this may be my last chance.

The wikipedia page says it supports D3D5. But you can try 6. Who knows a driver update may bring support!

Welp, I tried going through the format process in the Windows 98 setup and then copied all my files that I backed up from my hard drive that I put on my USB drive back to the hard drive, and now explorer's broken, which means I'm gonna have to reinstall Windows 98 all the way from the beginning again.

CrazyCritic89 wrote on 2020-09-19, 07:07:

Welp, the intro loads, then after I get the error: "Failed to set video mode - resetting to defaults. […]
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Welp, the intro loads, then after I get the error:
"Failed to set video mode - resetting to defaults.

Game will now restart with the new game settings."
Click OK, same thing happens.

What did you change to get this far?

Oh wait, nevermind, Scandisk actually fixed something for once!

Also, to get that far, I just ran it under Windows XP.

Honestly, I think I'm gonna get back to doing this later as I'm kinda worked out from reinstalling, using different methods, and it not working.

I prefer to do this kind of testing in a VM for those reasons and then once I'm done then play it on the real system. Doing test without a VM like in the old days (before when VPC and Vmware came out) is beyond frustrating.
Of course in this case you wouldn't get 3D acceleration in a 9x VM but most of the issues with getting HL2 to work are down to corrupted game files and the steam requirement which can be tested on a newer OS in a VM with 3D Acceleration.

If the game progresses further on the same PC on XP then you know the game is good (mabye), the steam emulator may not be compatible with 9x though so you may want to use dependency walker and the like with the game the next time you run it on 9x or just install kernelex and see if you get further.

CrazyCritic89 wrote on 2020-09-18, 19:20:

So I've trying to run Half-Life 2 on my Windows 98 machine. My Windows 98 machine has a Voodoo 2 8MB, a Pentium 2 at 400 MHz, and 384 MB of RAM. Now, I bet there's 300 reasons why this is unlikely to work, but currently the problem ain't even the specs right now, the problem is that I can't get it running under Windows 98 in the first place. Windows 98 will just not load it, even in a VM. I keep on getting the error, "unable to load engine.dll," and have no clue how to fix it. I can't find any information about this error online, and so I thought to turn to here. I hope that there's someone here who can help.

According to a research on Voodoo2 card on Wiki, it supports till DX5. So even if it runs, it won't never run great and would rely on software emu. The engine.dll problem might be related to it. I found a PCGAMER article about a person who used Voodoo2 to run the game.

>Voodoo2
>400MHz Pentium
>HL2

kek

if this is legit, I don't even think your system meets the minimum requirements. If you manage to get it to work, you will absolutely murder your system, like literally. Remember that the only thing keeping that V2 cool is a heatsink, and V2s are getting expensive!

Also, like another user said, only WinXP VMs work with any type of 3D acceleration.

Well, I'm back, and I'm picking this back up and trying to do it again... tomorrow since I have to download the game again.