I've never seen anything myself. I suggest you go ask the guys working on the Linux "nouveau" driver.

why would you want to build an emulator for this card its nothing special
and there are no geforce 4 mx special edition games
its a standard dx7 card

yeah, I wonder too why an emulator for a gf4mx...

Davros wrote:

why would you want to build ... for this card its nothing special

Hmm...I was thinking the same thing about the 2MB and 4MB S3 PCI cards 5 years ago...now it turns out these are one of the most practical to use in old PCI systems.

I don't understand what the use of emutated GF2MX's could be, but the GF2MX seem like excellent all-round cards when taking into account their capabilities. They're nothing special...it's what make them so special? 😜

What makes them special, is that they can use nvidia's detonators before they really started to regress everything in the name of "the way it's meant to be played"

Yeah it's meant to be played crappy, didn't you know that 😉

theres a dx 9 class graphics card emulator if your interested
http://attila.ac.upc.edu/wiki/index.php/Attila_Project

And there's Swiftshader, the one that can run Crysis. 🤣

Also, Michael Abrash and co's Pixomatic is a sweet software renderer that somebody ought to figure out how to convert into a driver.

but it cant run dx7 games 🙁
although pixomatic can

Thanks. I want to build Geforce4 MX440 emulator because of nostalgia.
Don't call me moron. I will try to google further and take a look at this project at leisure time. Really thanks
Jack

Say goodbye to your leisure time, then. It's not a simple card like you think it is.

... who called you a moron?

You're wasting your time with building a GF4MX440 emulator, full stop. Detonator was the name of the DRIVERS they used, before they changed to Forceware.

Most modern GFX cards can run all the stuff what a GF4 can anyway, so you're pretty much flogging a dead horse there, mate.

wocko1 wrote:

Most modern GFX cards can run all the stuff what a GF4 can anyway, so you're pretty much flogging a dead horse there, mate.

As I understand it, the "holy grail" is a pure software solution that will allow Direct3D acceleration in a Win9x client running in vmWare or Virtual PC - because currently, there is no effective way to run on a modern PC a game that requires both Win9x and hardware acceleration. (This might become feasible with full Voodoo emulation in DOSBox, but of course DOSBox is not intended to run Win9x.)

Can that be done with this Pixomatic or Attila Project? I had not heard of them before.

Well I did hear that wined3d may be a way to run D3D games in 9x via a VM, but I can't say for sure because I haven't tested it myself.

By the way, can you name any games that fit in all three of these categories:

i) The game can only run on Win9x
ii) The game *requires* Direct3D
iii) There are no patches or workarounds to make the game run on XP/Vista/7

wocko1 wrote:

Well I did hear that wined3d may be a way to run D3D games in 9x via a VM, but I can't say for sure because I haven't tested it […]
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Well I did hear that wined3d may be a way to run D3D games in 9x via a VM, but I can't say for sure because I haven't tested it myself.

By the way, can you name any games that fit in all three of these categories:

i) The game can only run on Win9x
ii) The game *requires* Direct3D
iii) There are no patches or workarounds to make the game run on XP/Vista/7

Well, iirc I couldn't get Piranha to run on XP, and running it in VPC ran dreadfully slow!
Piranha works fine in ME though.

lucky you do realise to build an emulator of a dx7 gpu it will take you years and if it runs in anything approaching double digit framerates it will be a miracle attilla a full dx9 graphics card emulator runs at 1 frame per 30minutes
(or do you mean just a software rasteriser or a dx7 wrapper)

ps: you are aware that a modern card can run dx7 just fine

WineD3D is a D3D->OpenGL wrapper, like how they get D3D games to run in Linux (which of course has no native D3D support due to M$ proprietary BS).
Kind of how Glide was translated to OpenGL.

Piranah? After a quick google, there isn't much information on that game.

There's no hardware OpenGL acceleration in Win9x running under virtual machines, either, so WineD3D won't help there.

But perhaps the problem with D3D in Win9x games has been overstated after all. Here's one old thread:
Games: when do you stop using Windows 98, and start using Windows XP?

I think Swiftshader is also an option, and I guess it's unlikely that any kind of lower-level emulation will end up being faster than that.
Is there any working to support Direct 3D in Win9x emulation?

There really aren't any datasheets available for Nvidia cards... at least, not publicly. Other than the hardware memory controller, it's just a die-shrunk NV11, which itself is a cut-down NV15, which itself is a bug-fixed, feature-tweaked version of the hoary old NV10/GeForce256 GPU from 1999. Writing an emulator for a plain-jane DirectX 7 accelerator would be an interesting exercise, but you'd probably need a LOT of research to effectively attack the problem.

Potential sources of information include:
- The Nouveau project, who will probably look at you funny for a moment, then share what they know;
- The source code for the abandoned OpenGL driver for BeOS;
- Maybe some part of the crusty old Utah-GLX Nvidia drivers.

A more beneficial use of your time might be to research the general capabilities outlined in Microsoft's DirectX 7 specification (which is a free download), and write a compatibility layer that rigidly adheres to that. It would probably be at least as featureful as the original GeForce line, and might be of tremendous help in running old games on new hardware. On the other hand, if you're still interested in writing a driver, why not create one that's compatible with VMWare Fusion or OpenBox? If it maps to underlying OpenGL calls on the host OS, it should be fairly straightforward from a "big picture" scenario.

Good luck!