leileilol wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:06:
Jo22 wrote on 2023-01-24, 18:08:
Nearly all Direct3D games ran in software mode, originally.
No they didn't. Only a few offer Direct3D's software mode and they're usually retained mode clunkers from 1997 (Lego Island, MSVRML, etc).
Early Direct3D games that also had a software renderer were their own independently written software renderer (Hellbender, Jedi Knight, etc)
Um, Retained Mode was the *real* Direct3D to my understanding. 🤷♂️
It was the sophisticated one with a full concept of a scene, as far as I know.
That immediate mode was for devs who couldn't handle it (just kidding), thus implementing the 3D world in their own game/engine.
Sure, they may had trouble using software mode without extra code. That'd make sense.
D3D RM was capable of running via CPU all alone, if I'm not mistaken.
leileilol wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:06:
These games having software renderers of their own does not imply VirtualPC is any good for 3d acceleration.
I'm afraid you're slightly twisting my words here (or it's just a misunderstanding; no big deal either way).
What I meant to say: Virtual PC was good for Windows 9x, but I didn't mean to claim it was necessarily good at 3D acceleration.
(It had working 2D acceleration for all of its supported guest. Up to 16 MB of VRAM could be used by editing the VMC files.)
- It were PPC Macintosh versions 2+3 by Connectix which allowed using an existing Voodoo 1 or 2.
Connectix was that company who also got into gaming through the "Virtual Game Station"; a PlayStation player for PC/Mac. 😉
The Windows versions 2004/2007 of Virtual PC are another story. They're virtualizers, also.
However, they emulate a similar chipset than the predecessor:
S3 Trio series (previously S3 86C928), SB16 (previously SB Pro 1; buggy OPL),
Intel 440 series mainboard, PIIX4 IDE controller (Win9x can use DMA option),
DEC 21140 network card..
The development of Virtual PC dates back to the mid-/late 90s, before VMware or Virtual Box were around.
hose two don't even have "VM Guest Additions" (in VPC terminology) for DOS/DOS-based Windows.
VPC had a seamless mouse driver for Windows 3.1x, even.
And DOS drivers for shared folders, avoiding the need for network drivers.
The driving force behind their development is providing virtualization solutions for the business sector, Windows 9x is irrelevant to them.
It's rather all about Linux, Solaris, Windows NT, OS/2 etc. Virtual PC, by comparison, was more generic.
It also included private users in the past (VPC was sold in card board boxes). Later got OS/2 guest/host support.
The Macintosh versions had USB support, too, which wasn't really available on PC until Windows Virtual PC (a bad spin-off of VPC).
Using VMware/VBox for Windows 9x isn't optimal by any means, I think.
Windows 9x runs as good as if you would run it in safe-mode on an old PC, in my opinion.
The classic "VGA" emulation (in quotation marks, because it was synthetic, not based on a real card, anyway)
in VBox was removed due to security concerns just recently, thus breaking Windows XP 3D acceleration (WineD3D; another story).
That means that the existing communication channel between guest-host longer exists.
Not sure how things are at VMware, though.
Using PCem/86Box is an alternative, I would agree, since they both can emulate similarly authentic 90s hardware, like VPC did.
Even have the Voodoo option. However, they're very demanding. It's not their fault, of course, but they are.
Normal office PCs could handle Virtual PC 2004/2007 just fine.
You could easily use them to run Windows 9x and use your old software development tools,
AutoCad, Photoshop, astronomy software etc.
In PCem/86Box, the same task is much more of a pain.
You're degrading a 3GHz Pentium 4 to a Pentium 90, essentially.
Sure, some of you people with an AMD Ryzen JackTheRipper or Intel i12 processor out there may not be affected and may not mind. 😉
But on a more down-to-earth PC, say and AMD Athlon X2 or an Core2Duo, it's not much fun.
Unless 486DX emulation is good enough. For DOS/Win 3.1x, it certainly is an option.
I don't mean to be unfair, but compared to VPC 2004/2007 and before,
all the current alternatives aren't very Windows 9x friendly so far from what I can tell.
Maybe this changes somewhen in the future, once after VMware/VBox have guest additions for Windows 9x. 😂
Miracles are happening from time to time.
Maybe one of the VM developers of a major VM solution takes heart and does a bit of overtime?! 🙂♥️
Edit: Proofreading my own posts makes me slightly perplexed. 😕
I would have never thought that I would someday stand up for Windows 9x, in some way or another.
When Windows XP came out, I pretty much left the buggy Windows 98SE behind.
Hm. life is strange sometimes. 🙂
Edit: Some typos fixed. Edited. Reformatted.
BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:14:
Only if there was no 3D acceleration available.
But wasn't this the norm ? 😕 -The normal people I knew in the 90s didn't even know what this was.
By "normal", I mean mortals. Those who weren't into video games, but normal computing - web browsing, word processing, failing at Linux..
They ran Windows 95/98 on beefed-up 486 PC era hardware, still. Generic hardware, not aimed torwards Windows/DirectX.
Some also had gotten a modern PC (with lots of MHz) from the super market/discounter, with some lame Trident TGUI/3DImage card installed.
Or they got an office PC (say, a Pentium MMX from late '96; still fresh in '97/'98) straight from a major PC shop, without any 3D accelerator card installed, without AGP slots.
And even if they had something moddest like an S3 ViRGE/DX or ATI MACH64/ATI Rage, it likely didn't go past DirectX 3 or 5 feature-level DDI.
The software side had to make up for the missing functionality in some way or another.
BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:14:It was available and known as HAL popularly then and was differentiated from software processing.
Most games used DirectDraw in […]
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It was available and known as HAL popularly then and was differentiated from software processing.
Most games used DirectDraw in mid 90s. D3D got popular post-1997 afaik. In absence of DirectDraw hardware acceleration
they used software acceleration but I don't remember calling it "Reference Rasterizer", I knew it as "HEL" (Hardware Emulation Layer) [avoid confusion with HAL].
The first time I heard about "Reference Rasterizer" was in DirectX7 which included a reference d3dref.dll file.
Pardon. It's been so long - I started "getting into" these things near the end of the 90s. 😅
At the time of which DirectX 6.x/Windows 98SE were around and DirectX 7 just around the corner.
It's well possible that I'm mixing some things up and am using terminology from DirectX 7.
The term HEL is more appropriate, I suppose. I remember it, too.
By the way, who coined the abbreviation for HAL?
Was HAL a reference to H-A-L 9000, by any chance? 😂
BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:14:
The Direct3D software emulation equivalent was Direct3D Ramp and RGB, which goes as old as in Shadows of the Empires.
I believe I haven't heard of those since the DirectX 3 days (through older games that I played at the turn of the century). 😅
Edit: Formatting fixed (at home, on PC). Edited.