It seems geforce 5700 LE doesn't support this driver, so I need to change videocard or it's okay to use 56.64 driver? I will lose compatibility with windows 98 games or not?

At this point, isn't is just better to run older Windows games in Linux under Wine and Proton? Wine tends to have better support for older Windows APIs and would be more secure as well.

I'm just trying to understand in what scenarios it would still be worth bothering with Windows XP and outdated video drivers, and whether that would really get the most optimal result for Windows 3.x and Windows 9x games from the late 90s.

digger wrote on 2024-06-20, 17:56:

At this point, isn't is just better to run older Windows games in Linux under Wine and Proton? Wine tends to have better support for older Windows APIs and would be more secure as well.

I'm just trying to understand in what scenarios it would still be worth bothering with Windows XP and outdated video drivers, and whether that would really get the most optimal result for Windows 3.x and Windows 9x games from the late 90s.

Authentic experience? Nostalgia?

digger wrote on 2024-06-20, 17:56:

At this point, isn't is just better to run older Windows games in Linux under Wine and Proton? Wine tends to have better support for older Windows APIs and would be more secure as well.

I'm just trying to understand in what scenarios it would still be worth bothering with Windows XP and outdated video drivers, and whether that would really get the most optimal result for Windows 3.x and Windows 9x games from the late 90s.

Is it possible to have good quality antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, EAX sound and other fancy stuff in linux?

I know Wine supports EAX, not sure about all the various versions of it.

As for the graphical stuff, it has pretty good Direct3D support and it wraps it to OpenGL or Vulkan. A side-by-side comparison for some games (between Linux and Windows XP on various hardware or hypervisors) might be interesting.

But I do remember watching a YouTube video that interviewed various people on how best to play older Windows games on newer machines. It was indeed a surprisingly hard problem the tackle, especially for early Direct3D games, if I'm not mistaken. And at least in some cases, the best results were to be had on Linux with Wine.

One advantage of Linux and Wine is that it continues to be developed to this day. And regularly, certain fixes and improvements are released that even benefit some very old games.

digger wrote on 2024-06-20, 17:56:

At this point, isn't is just better to run older Windows games in Linux under Wine and Proton? Wine tends to have better support for older Windows APIs and would be more secure as well.

I'm just trying to understand in what scenarios it would still be worth bothering with Windows XP and outdated video drivers, and whether that would really get the most optimal result for Windows 3.x and Windows 9x games from the late 90s.

Soft-Synths. Windows XP is the last OS with support for DirectMusic drivers (SYXG50, Virtual Sound Canvas 3, Web Synth D-77 etc).
Munt and YMF262 FM Synth Emulator can be installed, too. The former is useful for Neko Project 21W, a PC-98 emulator (has MIDI out).

But that's just me, of course. I'm often using XP VMs for many things. 😅
On real hardware, there are other solutions. Someone can use a real MIDI module or something like mt32pi.

_
Btw, some emulators like *Project 64 1.6 can't handle lots of memory and crash if they see, say, 24GB of RAM. 😉
In such a situation, a little XP installation on a lower-end PC an still help (be it real or a VM or an emulation).

XP is quick and doesn't add much overhead. The specs can be quite low, thus.
It also can be used with Glide wrappers (say nGlide 2.10) on older hardware (DX6 GPU).

But that's also a weak point maybe. Virtual Box did drop 3D support for XP in version 6.x.
The experimental support also was being limited to Direct3D 8/9, everything older had to fall back using software rendering.

By using a more modern Windows, such as Windows Vista/7, gives better compatibility, perhaps.
These versions are being better supported by both modern graphics drivers and current VM software.

Here, emulators and also games can try to access DirectX 9EX, 10 and 11 with varying success.
I got Project 64 v1.6 running in an Windows 7 VM with 2GB of RAM, for example, using the emulator's old Direct3D 8 plug-in (D3D 8 and 9 are similar).

The drawback was that the video output was drawing over the pull-down menus. The old emulator was using GDI for the GUI items, after all.
If I had Windows XP (GDI+ based) going here instead, the pull-down menus might have been visible, not sure.

Edit: That being said, the idea with WINE wasn't bad at all.
In fact, many update projects for XP use WineD3D to modernize old XP.

(* The infamous "Failed to allocate Memory" error)

digger wrote on 2024-06-20, 17:56:

At this point, isn't is just better to run older Windows games in Linux under Wine and Proton? Wine tends to have better support for older Windows APIs and would be more secure as well.

Isn't this a subforum for old hardware?

havli wrote on 2024-06-20, 20:25:

Is it possible to have good quality antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, EAX sound and other fancy stuff in linux?

They tend to not have control panels or even environment variables for that from my experience. OpenGL only does application-specified MSAA.

When I looked into limiting available memory (as you'd do in windows), the linux user response to that is something like "fix your app or you're SOL you closed source evil lover" , not even touching the idea of using tempfs (a ram drive).

There's some MESA variables about limiting extension years for compatibility (the vaguest way to fake older hardware and prevent extension list buffer overflows) and some backends, but that's it as far as I know. No dithering.

Wine versions are also a gamble with regards to regressions. I'll not go into the sound system politics (alsa vs pulseaudio vs jack, lack of midi control, volume sliders going rogue, etc)

Yes this is a subforum specifically about old hardware.

Keeper95 wrote on 2024-06-20, 17:40:

It seems geforce 5700 LE doesn't support this driver, so I need to change videocard or it's okay to use 56.64 driver? I will lose compatibility with windows 98 games or not?

5700 came late in the GeForce FX generation. I think 53.04 is the earliest with support for at least some of the 5700 cards. Just try whatever drivers work and see if the games you want to play work well with them. Newer drivers do add some extra features like OpenGL triple buffering (appears with Forceware 75.xx I believe). That's nice if you like to use vsync. With XP I'm somewhat partial to 93.71 because I remember it fixing some DVI issues I once had.