First post, by blueshogun96
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- Newbie
I was searching the FAQ and I did not see an answer to this question here. I was wondering if PCI emulation was added to DOSBox. Last time I checked, PCI was never implemented.
The reason I'm asking was because at one point, I was going to attempt to add support for SST-1 (3Dfx Voodoo) for DOSBox so I could play some of those old 3Dfx games for DOS again (and obviously, kekko beat me to it). I tried running some of the Glide SDK's DOS samples and it would always give me the "no PCI detected" error upon startup. Now that kekko has successfully gotten the basics of SST-1 emulated, I'm assuming that PCI is supported somewhat. The 3Dfx supported version probably isn't part of the SVN though (haven't checked yet).
"Even if PCI is supported, 3Dfx emulation has already been added. Now what do you want to do?" Good question. Some of you might have noticed that I started a thread about writing an NV1 wrapper (NVIDIA NV1 Wrapper). Since it doesn't look like I'll have the skills to reverse engineer the entire NV1 API, I figured that actually emulating the hardware would be the best bet for the time being.
There isn't much documentation on the NV1, but there is enough to do some basic emulation of the hardware. The documentation on the PCI registers and such was really hard to come by but I did find it by accident a few years ago and I was smart enough to actually save it too because I never did find it again. XFree86 also had a working driver, although it was very basic and lacked 3D acceleration. I figured that this would be a good place to start on that.
In spite of the lack of documentation, there's another problem: There aren't very many games that utilize the NV1 card. So far, I only have 2 games that support it:
- Battle Arena Toshinden (DOS)
- Panzer Dragoon 1 (Windows)
So they are all I have to work with atm. Since I can't get Windows 95 to work on DOSBox to save my life, I guess getting Battle Arena Toshinden working would be a first step for now, but I'd still like to see if I can get Windows 95 to recognize the card in one of the PCI slots.
Oops, forgot one more issue. Unlike SST-1, the NV1 contains a 32Kb BIOS. I don't have this card (it's been a pain in the arse obtaining one) and I don't know where to begin dumping it or finding a firmware upgrade for this card (if any ever existed). If I had the card, I guess I could write a 32-bit DOS app to get the PCI registers and read the first 32Kb of the region where it resides. Can't guarantee that would work, but I guess it's worth a try.
So, any advice is greatly appreciated. I'd rather not re-invent the wheel (as in implement PCI myself if it hasn't already). Thanks.
Shogun.