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Is this the possibility of a Power VR SGL Wrapper?

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First post, by Bladeforce

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBfIbvYO3f4

Legit or just a load of BS?

Personally I hope it is legit as i'd love to play the few powervr games again

Reply 1 of 133, by Stiletto

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https://www.youtube.com/user/Tuxality/videos
Hmmmm... it seems like you might be right?
Given the development videos, looks legit to me.

Tuxality is already a member here:
Tuxality

... and previously made a patch for Virtual-On:
http://redtux.rocik.net/

I'll send him a PM. 😀

No pressure though, it seems he has very little spare time for this project. 😀 (Don't we all?)

---

VOGONS past discussion on PowerVR PowerSGL wrappers:
PowerVR SGL Wrapper?
PowerVR PCX2 wrapper/emulator
Re: 3D Accelerator Comparison Thread
Re: Help with running Biohazard PowerVR edition jp !
Re: dgVoodoo 2 for DirectX 11

PowerVR PowerSGL Games List:
Re: The Ultimate 3D Accelerated Supported Games List (Early proprietary APIs - NO 3DFX/GLIDE)

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 2 of 133, by Tuxality

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Hello everyone, at first thanks Stiletto for PM and sorry for my English - it's not my native language.

Yes, it is legit, I don't see a point of making fake videos. 😀 For now it works like in "Bugfix #4" video, it's textured but really badly - most UVs are wrong values, so it looks... weird, but quite cute. 😀 Two games which are working are Virtual On and PureVex. Also most of SGL demos from the SDK are working too, but not all. There is one problem which I have to workaround (that's why games for ex. like Turok will not work with this wrapper), but I don't have free time, so it's mainly matter of time I guess. Also I don't have any more games for SGL so if anybody is willing to share it would be quite useful.

Also I have two similar projects, the first one is ATI3DCIF wrapper and second one is NV1 wrapper (mostly emulation + wrapping to OpenGL).
Unfortunately, the problem is small amount of free time. 😀

And despite joining in 2011 and not having written any post till today, I actually have been reading a lot of topics here and I would like to thank you for this great community.

Reply 3 of 133, by Stiletto

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Wow, this is amazing! Above and beyond my expectations. You are fantastic.

I wish you all the time in the world to work on these, but we've been this patient so far, what's another five years? 😁

You should be able to find all the SDKs on VOGONSDrivers thanks to all the work from people who have come before (including myself! 🤣)

Nvidia NV1 has another person working on it: blueshogun96. You guys should compare notes (or even work together) at some point. I gave him a heads' up when that SDK went online, see newest posts: NVIDIA NV1 Wrapper
or here: http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthre … rapper&p=628479
and its newest posts.

ATI3DCIF does not have much work done at this point. If you've done some research in the past on this, you'll see the name: Euan. He gave me the code to his WIP wrapper (he never made it very far at all) and wished to share it with anyone who wanted to work on it. I'll upload it to VOGONSDrivers when I can. Obviously there's a lot of prior investigation by Gona: http://gona.mactar.hu/ATI_3D_CIF/
[EDIT] It's now here: http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=717

I have the desire to see these done as open-source projects in Direct3D 9 (or earlier) and/or an older version of OpenGL, but seeing as it's beyond my skillset to make them, I can't really call the shots. Can you tell us your plans (when you can)? 😀

BTW, your English is perfectly understandable! 😀

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 4 of 133, by leileilol

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Cool 😀

Would be neat to see shaders eventually used too, maybe to do PVR's depth sorting or their alpha blending imprecisions (in theory: force nearest neighbor, then do blocky bilinear filtering at 16x the texture's resolution with RGBA4444, and get the modulated alpha channel posterized to 4 bits per pixel)

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 6 of 133, by Tuxality

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Stiletto, Yeah, I was shocked when I saw NV1 SDK publicly available. It contains a lot of useful low-level code and information about NV1. It was a nice day, because I thought about NV1 and making a wrapper. I wrote some keywords in the websearch and guess what? The same day it was publicly available, I was really shocked by this coincidence. I was reverse engineering NV1 for a long time without owning one and without SDK, but this is really useful. Thanks for this! 😀

Actually my ATI3DCIF wrapper is far more advanced than Euan's one. If I remember correctly I was in the middle of doing DirectDraw wrapper specially for the ATI3DCIF so I could make Tomb Raider working, but I stopped the project at this point and never came back, but I'm planning to resume this after making SGL a little more usable.

As for NV1 wrapper, it's just a stub, as I was focused mainly on SGL wrapper (Virtual On got my interest), but it will change because I'm also interested in accelerated Panzer Dragoon. 😀

I will keep you posted when situation will change about SGL wrapper. For now I fixed rendering and got Nightmare Creatures working without glitches. I think that next week I will have some time to implement something new in my wrapper. The goal is to fix texturing, make games which renders the same way as Turok to work, fix Unreal Engine games (crashes with texture loading error) and implement some stuff like infinite planes properly - I'm looking for that PVR dedicated Ultimate Race for testing, but didn't found it. For now it's quite basic wrapper and SGL debugger which rely on OpenGL 1.1 - I think it should run even on OpenGL 1.0 based cards, but I haven't tested yet that much. Also I'm thinking of making in future a fork with D3D9 or older renderer. I'm focusing on running this on older cards, so shaders does not come into play - maybe in future version, but not now.

And about opensourcing this project, it might and probably will be opensourced but I don't like releasing pre-alpha quality code to public, this applies to all three projects.

TBH, I didn't thought that so much people will be interested in this wrapper, it's nice for me.

Reply 7 of 133, by truth_deleted

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Your project's design seems ideal, especially using the cross-platform opengl language. It must be a lot of work to develop the SGL wrapper, and I'm certainly anticipating your updates. I'm particular interested in the Unreal engines and their appearance under SGL. Thank you!

Reply 8 of 133, by VirtuaIceMan

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Tuxality, you can get a demo of the PowerVR exclusive game Moon Racer here: http://www.fileplanet.com/11362/10000/fileinfo/Moon-Racer (it's a futuristic racer with low gravity)

I had PowerVR a long time ago, but sold it all now :-p

Vetz on here (vetz) also will have some PowerVR titles, including the rare 1-track version of Ultim@te Race, as he showed on his YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/RetroCompaqGuy/videos

My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor

Reply 9 of 133, by vetz

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There are several PowerSGL demos out there, see this thread:
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

Or go directly to the demo list (which is also added to the main list):
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 10 of 133, by leileilol

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and of course those MiniGL-based games wrap OpenGL to SGL but this may get a little recursive when used with the wrapper.... the exception being Quake2 since that just dynamically loads pvrgl.dll and works its way from there

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 12 of 133, by Tuxality

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Got 5 minutes of free time, so I decided to force Turok Dinosaur Hunter to work, result here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtlDsEoFR9I
Looks funny and does crash after level loading sequence, so nothing really special but it's still a progress (taking into account time given), because other games which are rendering the same way should work now or just boot properly. 😀 The PVR logo is rendered by wrapper also it can make screenshot of whole rendering context to file by pressing F9.

The other games which are working:
Moon Racer - working, stable, pretty much null rendering due to a lot of unimplemented (or badly implemented) functions
Nightmare Creatures - fully working, stable and glitchfree, just no textures
Motorhead - this one worries me, because it should work but it isn't, it is connected with the way my wrapper is written (need to redesign my wrapper concept)

In my opinion SGL API is well-designed, easy to learn quite hard to master and for now it is my favourite API from that era. The main downside is that it's quite CPU intensive especially for that older CPUs. On another side, is anybody interested in OpenGL -> SGL wrapper for PCX family?

Reply 13 of 133, by vetz

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The games people will be most interested in playing with the SGL wrapper will be Mechwarrior 2, Resident Evil and Cybertroopers (in my opinion). If you can get Tomb Raider working as well that might be of interest for some as it can do 1024x768, but that is the only PowerVR game that is running in DOS so it might take too much time to get running.

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 14 of 133, by Tuxality

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I know that, it's quite obvious, but I need to test in other games how my wrapper behaves. Also the more, the better. Cybertroopers is working quite good, just need to do proper texturing and fix minor issues. I don't have Resident Evil for PVR so it's a no-go for me to test it and develop wrapper for that game unless somebody is willing to share a digital copy for test. Mechwarrior 2 is not working on my rig for now and this is actually not related to my wrapper, so temporary another no-go. About Tomb Raider I'm planning to make ATI3DCIF version usable as it's only one Win32 release available.

Reply 15 of 133, by Stiletto

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Any progress is good progress. I hope you can make textures work.

For the record, before the PowerVR SDK share, leilelol found headers and libraries inside one of the M3D driver discs. He (she?) also found a newer SGL.h inside the Deus Ex SDK.

As for an OpenGL to SGL wrapper... sure, we're interested! Anything at this point is probably better than original, or the Techland SGL OpenGL wrapper.
I personally do not have the original hardware though.

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 16 of 133, by VirtuaIceMan

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Tuxality, give the Moon Racer demo I listed a go, it's PowerVR exclusive. You could try Ultim@te Race if you can find a copy (I think even the commercial release Ultim@te Race Pro supports PowerVR SGL too, as it moans about the .dll every time I start it up!).

My PC spec: Win10 64bit, i7-4970K (not overclocked), KFA2 GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Creative Soundblaster ZXr, 16GB RAM, Asus Z97-A motherboard, NZXT 410 case, ROG Swift GSYNC monitor

Reply 18 of 133, by leileilol

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Tuxality wrote:

On another side, is anybody interested in OpenGL -> SGL wrapper for PCX family?

Yes

Beating unsupported blending functions into approximate temporary generated textures would probably be the biggest challenge though (including demoting alpha channels from textures without a blendfunc). PVR Extreme doesn't work with Q3A, Techland SGL barely works with it and is as raw as it gets (and I have several videos showing the PCX2 in several GL games that don't work on Extreme)

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 19 of 133, by Tuxality

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Sorry for spam, but I just forced textures to render properly, look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u5Fywc9KmE

Still not perfect, but quite interesting. It may be funny, but debugging Turok actually helped me to achieve what you see now. In case you are wondering, Turok is still a Glitchfest. 😁 The another good news is that Ultim@te Race Pro is working now with SGL! 😀

I also spent some time on ATI3DCIF w/ DDraw wrapper for Tomb Raider, but it looks like I lost my recent version of the project and now I need to rewrite it. 🙁