Wrote the program because I was horrified to see that one of my favourite games of all time was reduced to scratchy, pixelated graphics on modern computers. Found out a little about glide wrappers, and discovered that none supported DOS games. Also read that it was supposedly impossible to make a DOS-based glide wrapper, because DirectX and OpenGL are not supported under DOS. I've worked in software engineering for many years, often asked to work on problems which others have given up on, so it always niggled me that I might be able to find a way around it. Didn't really think I had much chance, because I'd never had a PC in the DOS era, and knew nothing about the intacacies of DOS, or how it interfaced with Windows.
Cruised around the web, for months picking up info on DOS extenders, ovl files and VxDs (all new to me), and realised there was a way to create a DOS based wrapper. I could see it was going to be difficult, though, because DOS programming is a dying art: it was even hard to get appropriate compilers; had to ring up someone in SyBase and plead for them to sell me a copy of Watcom C/C++.
From there it looked as though I had two jobs to do, one to write an application to carry Glide calls between DOS and Windows, and secondly to create a Windows based glide wrapper to map the glide calls into DirectX or OpenGL. Had a stroke of luck, though, in discovering Fabio Barros' open source wrapper, OpenGLide. That reduced the second task to just a little updating of his wrapper. I remember well when I first connected it all together, and first saw Lara running around in a Windows window - although she was dressed like a convict - brown clothes with arrows on, except the arrows were replaced with shotgun bullets (textures were screwed up). I think it was about a year before I actually had something running reasonably.
Things to come:
Alpha masks and transparency support for texture packs is done. I have a version ready to release, but this messes up use of the current TRX textures, so I have to wait for Matthew to update his textures.
In that same release there is also a solution for the one remaining problem with Descent II support. Descent runs at quite a high frame rate, and glide wrapping isn't amazingly efficient, so Descent II under Glidos is quite a challenge for a computer. Strangly, although most of the rendering of the main scenes works very speedily, Glidos stumbles on drawing the green-text messages that Descent II produces. At last I've found a way to cache the letters in Glidos, and now it runs silky smooth.
32bit colour support is probably not at all difficult. Its just a case of getting around to it, but I've no idea when I will.
Getting new games going
Really really difficult. It is almost never just a case of making a new profile. The Glide emulation is a long way off complete (although it gets nearer each new game that is supported), so first go at getting a new game going often produces only odd bits of graphics here and there, with even that being corrupted.
Descent II, for example, did nothing at first because Glidos didnt' support the way the menus are handled. Then I stumbled on a the sequence of keys that starts the game, and all I could see was the lasers - no ship, or environment. I could tell the ship was moving because the way the laser trajectory bent, and I could see that obsticals would stop the laser bolts early, but I couldn't see what they were hitting. Can easily take a month or two to get a new game going.
Not sure any of that is interesting, but...
