Arrrg jamyskis I screwed up your post! Sorry! Here's my reply tho!
The problem is that a lot of people are using Vista 32-bit though which causes a few problems. The alternative would be to implement a third-party VDMSound-style subsystem implementing 16-bit support, since Microsoft decided it was irrelevant for the 64-bit version of Vista.
Thank god no. NTVDM is horrible. NO MORE! I'm glad an equivalent isn't included in 64bit Vista. Also if you use WDDM drivers in 32bit Vista you will not be able to run a full-screen command prompt so no DOS games for you! (Unless they use DosBox of course)....or they can revert back to XP video drivers which is not a good idea.
That's fine for Vista users, but what about people with Macs/Linux/whatever?
There is always Wine.....I haven't been very fond of it since it makes more since to just play the games that run well in Windows to just play them in Windows.....
Besides, WDDM is supposed to help improve driver stability, I wasn't aware that it had any effect on virtualisation technology. Then again, I'm not an expert in this field.
It's more about virtualizing the GPU to allow multple threads . WGF2.0 will allow this. Don't know when it will be out exactly. Hopefully when SP1/Longhorn server is released.
I must admit that I've not tried the patch so I can't judge. Is this low-level 3D hardware emulation or an interface with the existing host 3D hardware? I might download the DOSBox CVS later on and the patch and see if I can get it going under Linux to take a look.
The patch intercepts the glide calls and redirects them to the host glide wrapper (zeckensack/dgvoodoo/openglide) and then uses either D3D/OGL to display.
But wouldn't performance suffer big time, converting from Glide to OpenGL and then to Direct3D and then back to OpenGL (for portability)?
Not for glide games in DosBox. (Okay compared to an original DOS machine then probably yes it will be slower). Also it only goes one way Glide->D3D or Glide->OGL depending on the host wrapper used.
If there were to be a windows port of DosBox and an effort to do D3D in DosBox then it would likely be D3D->OGL for compatibility sake, although Windows only D3D->D3D......or mabye D3D->D3D could work in Linux too if Wine was used in some fashion.....
Actually I'm going to have to beg to differ on this one. I have a collection of 1250+ games and about 15-20% of my Windows 95-98 games (i.e. 1999 and before) do not run properly under XP. I can only imagine that this is even worse under Vista. Sometimes these are just speed issues which I can deal with using winThrottle (the definitive CPU brake *hehe*) but more often than not it's an issue with the OS or hardware (for example, Sonic R doesn't like Athlon processors for whatever reason)
I said MOST games. 😀
Check my PC Game Compatibility list.... Yeah, Sonic R only works with P3/K6 erra processors IIRC. I'll have to check my list again to verify.
I've been going through my list testing Vista compatibility and so far:
1. No hardware sound in DirectSound3D gamesunless you have an X-FI sound card and are using the Alchemy Wrapper. Also I don't think it wraps A3D games either.....
2. Some installshield installers do not install....(Haven't narrowed down which versions yet exactly.)
3. No way to reduce sound acceleration....
4. No way to reduce video hardware acceleration if using WDDM drivers.
5. Graphical distortion in some games.
6. Audio distortion in some games.
7. I've noticed some games messing with DWM, had one game that made DWM eat memory like crazy and it wouldn't stop. heh. After I get done testing the rest of my games I'll go back and test it but it was pretty scary. Heck, I don't even know why DWM is running on this laptop anyway since it cannot even run Aero and is using XP video drivers....
8. Copy protection drivers require updates.
Can't think of anything else right now, I'll have to check my list.
Back when DOSBox first began most PCs were not fast enough to run DOS games newer than 1993. Now it's 2007, and DOSBox's compatibility is only thanks to the long development time, and we now have PCs fast enough to run emulated Tomb Raider (I can run Screamer 2 at a respectable speed on my humble Athlon 2400 512MB RAM with DOSBox 0.70). Eventually the hardware needed to run Win95 and Win98 and its software is going to be completely overtaken - give it 5 years and 32-bit support will probably begin to be phased out.
Of course. In much less than 5 years there will be a VM that will run our old Windows games with 3D acceleration. I guarantee it. Once WGF 2.0 comes out and all of the hardware is compliant and Vista SE or whatever they call it is released then I'm betting MS will implement their hypervisor support into their next client OS (it'll be in longhorn server later this year) and then Windows users can play their games in their guests. Hopefully they'll provide an emulated D3D card because obviously virtualizing a modern GPU won't help out old games that don't work well with modern GPU's.
Maybe virtualisation is a better solution in the short-term, but in the long term it would be better if an environment was available that offered complete control over the system emulated, including processor speed.
I don't see MS/Vmware working on emulated processors....they love their virtualization which sadly is not good for older games. I think we'll have to look towards open source Qemu\Dosbox for our emulation needs.
Actually WINE is one part of the puzzle, especially if we'd like to create an open-source retro Wingaming environment that doesn't require a copy of Windows to run (like DOSBox with MS-DOS). And in the short-term WINE is a good solution - but again, not long term.
Yeah, I don't know what WINE's longterm goals are. There has been alot of work put into it and their code is used in alot of other projects but as you state I don't know how usefull it will be in the long term and it's not usefull as a one-stop solution to gaming.