Any news. Tuxality? 😀

Hmm, let see... I managed to finally get rid of projection/perspective problems, now rendering is glitch free. Transparency is also working, although I should look if it's done right. Only my DirectDraw replacement is still not done. For now I have quite serious health issues, so I can't work on anything but I'm still thinking about wrappers mentioned on my website, just give me some time.

Tuxality wrote:

Hmm, let see... I managed to finally get rid of projection/perspective problems, now rendering is glitch free. Transparency is also working, although I should look if it's done right. Only my DirectDraw replacement is still not done. For now I have quite serious health issues, so I can't work on anything but I'm still thinking about wrappers mentioned on my website, just give me some time.

Well, we have plenty of time. 😀

Sorry to hear about your health, I hope you get well soon.

So... I made from scratch a new version of my PowerSGL wrapper, which also includes DirectDraw wrapper. I would like to release this as soon as possible, but first I need to finish DirectDraw wrapper and correct some SGL issues. I have attached link to the video and four screenshots from Virtual On. As you can see there are no more perspective issues, also game can be run in any resolution unlike first approach - screenshots taken in 1024x768 resolution. Posting this because as you can see I had a very long delay and I do not want people to think that it is a vaporware...

Video from Virtual On:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rk-wo2wewM

Screenshots from Virtual On:

Dude, you rock! Is this aimed towards modern systems or will someone be able to use this on a suitably retro PC (something beefy with a Pentium 3 and GeForce card maybe?) ?

Tuxality wrote:

So... I made from scratch a new version of my PowerSGL wrapper, which also includes DirectDraw wrapper. I would like to release […]
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So... I made from scratch a new version of my PowerSGL wrapper, which also includes DirectDraw wrapper. I would like to release this as soon as possible, but first I need to finish DirectDraw wrapper and correct some SGL issues. I have attached link to the video and four screenshots from Virtual On. As you can see there are no more perspective issues, also game can be run in any resolution unlike first approach - screenshots taken in 1024x768 resolution. Posting this because as you can see I had a very long delay and I do not want people to think that it is a vaporware...

Video from Virtual On:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rk-wo2wewM

Screenshots from Virtual On:

This is epic, makes me wish I hasn't sold all my PowerVR stuff!

Does the wrapper work with other games?

This is becoming interesting!

That IS cool.

Just a consideration: how many guys out there will enjoy these wrappers, an elite of about 10 people? The majority of these games were bundled with graphic cards and are hella rare, unlike what some people would have us believe...

Don't get me wrong, I love your projects!

In some cases legal game distributors like GOG discover that using a wrapper can make for enhanced game compatibility or enhanced graphics, and that makes for thousands of users. Case in point: Zeus Software/nGlide's partnership with GOG. Even so, while nGlide is closed source, it is not-for-profit.

Easter means some spare time, so I decided to work a little on SGL and S3DTK wrapper as Myloch requested. 😀

After doing complete rewrite of my wrappers in order to unify them with my new (sadly, not shiny yet) DirectDraw wrapper I couldn't make Biohazard to work any longer. Today I figured out that it was calling convention problem that made this game crashing...

I have attached screenshots from Biohazard that are running on my new reimplementation of SGL wrapper. Still not the best looking screenshots yet, but I haven't touched this since the last post here on Vogons, sorry. 🙁 As you can see the game is running in custom resolution and forced windowed mode, which SGL wrapper allows. Fun fact is that now Biohazard runs too fast on quite old machine, so it means that this game doesn't have framerate lock. Also, I have added support for configuration file which can be used to personalize behavior of wrapper for all applications and/or specific game.

Screenshots from Biohazard:

Tuxality wrote:

. Fun fact is that now Biohazard runs too fast on quite old machine, so it means that this game doesn't have framerate lock.

Makes sense for that as often the bus transfer speed would be the bottleneck to work/deal with getting around 28fps at best in 800x600x16 usually. 800x600x24/32 would be slightly faster but not a lot of games ever used that and many official drivers disable it by default 😀

Tuxality wrote:

. Fun fact is that now Biohazard runs too fast on quite old machine, so it means that this game doesn't have framerate lock.

Nothing surprising here 😀 Standard Windows version had the same problem. Just use cpu limiter (or even better solution: fps limiter) to fix the problem. I use bandicam and I set desired frames per second limit, it works like a charm!

Not needed as my wrappers already have implemented framerate locking which can be configured or just turned off per application. 😀

F2bnp wrote:

Dude, you rock! Is this aimed towards modern systems or will someone be able to use this on a suitably retro PC (something beefy with a Pentium 3 and GeForce card maybe?) ?

Sorry for late answer, but I've tested my wrapper on quite old machine with AMD Athlon 600MHz (Slot A), 128MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS and Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. You can see result here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRDc5JYH5k

I don't have any capture device, so recorded by using a N900. In order to show every stage in relative short time and cope with the problem of holding a camera I've used small cheat, which enable no shooting and/or killing first or second player on demand. It's triggered by key press. So, performance is quite qood, I have done optimization in some places and it seems that I'm not that bad coder as I thought. 😊 I think that even entry-level Pentium 3 and Riva TNT2 might be fast enough to run this wrapper. It actually requires more CPU raw power than GPU, but it still relies on good OpenGL implementation in GPU drivers. Also this video includes all of the improvement I have done on my wrapper. Now everything looks like it should, including transparency in Biohazard and all effects like fade in and fade out. I'll make a new video, which will show quality improvement in my wrapper on new PC.

For shits and giggles I've added TruForm support to my wrapper, but it didn't led to any interesting things rather than pumping mech's legs. 🤣 To get interesting results geometry needs to be prepared by the wrapper before enabling TruForm.

And last but not least I've added texture packs supports. Now wrapper can dump textures for you on demand and create texture pack config file, which can be altered by user including changing textures. If wrappers detects that user provided textures are different then it loads them instead of the original. So basically, like in any other wrapper you can make HD texture pack for any SGL game.

Nice progress!

It really starting to come together now! 😁

Thanks. 😀 Biohazard is looking even better in my opinion, I'll record gameplay at the end of week.

Tuxality wrote:

For shits and giggles I've added TruForm support to my wrapper, but it didn't led to any interesting things rather than pumping mech's legs. 🤣 To get interesting results geometry needs to be prepared by the wrapper before enabling TruForm.

mirh will be shitting his pants pretty soon now 😁

Tuxality wrote:

Now everything looks like it should

About Virtual On, maybe I'm wrong but aren't those center blue bars and upper energy bars supposed to contain some text/numbers?

Tuxality wrote:

Thanks. 😀 Biohazard is looking even better in my opinion

Time for legendary english resident evil PowerVR to popup! 🤣

Myloch wrote:

About Virtual On, maybe I'm wrong but aren't those center blue bars and upper energy bars supposed to contain some text/numbers?

Of course, as I wrote in the video description those are a part of overlay rendered by DirectDraw, which is (mostly) unimplemented yet. Solid bars are rendered by SGL and on top of that there is DirectDraw overlay with texts/numbers. It doesn't have anything to do with pure SGL/SGL Direct, I just still don't have fully working DirectDraw wrapper. For example Biohazard is using DirectDraw only for surface blitting, the rest of stuff including menu/texts is rendered by SGL only.