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Reply 20 of 49, by Unregistered

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I´ve just finished setting up a good ol´ dos/win98 machine and one of the first things to test was (ofcource) pod! I had an actual voodoo2-board installed (which wasn´t supported by pod in the first place too!) to see if I could get it to run. Here´s what happened:
Had to fix the installation because no glide.dll was detected (the voodoo2 started with glide2 right out of the box). Then patched it to version 2.1 . Lo and behold, it initialised my vooodoo! And crashed 🙁
Then I slowly tried patches and upgrades and read myself through a lot of threads. Finally I came to this conclusion:
On any Directx higher than 6 Pod refuses to start.
The desktop must be set to 16bit to get it to start even if you plan to run it on a voodoo.
AMD processors are bad (read: really really bad) if you want to get it to run. Tried it on a trusty old Intel p3-450 slot processor and it worked (although the mobo was crap, used DX5 and my voodoo2 with patched pod version).
So what does this altogether mean? Maybe a slim win98 "might" have a chance to get it to run with a glidewrapper. Sadly the 3d-functions of a graphics card are crippled inside most virtual machines, otherwise I might give it another shot on my main machine (the voodoo2 doesn´t fit in there because of those stupid raid connectors).

Reply 21 of 49, by Stiletto

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Unregistered wrote:
I´ve just finished setting up a good ol´ dos/win98 machine and one of the first things to test was (ofcource) pod! I had an actu […]
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I´ve just finished setting up a good ol´ dos/win98 machine and one of the first things to test was (ofcource) pod! I had an actual voodoo2-board installed (which wasn´t supported by pod in the first place too!) to see if I could get it to run. Here´s what happened:
Had to fix the installation because no glide.dll was detected (the voodoo2 started with glide2 right out of the box). Then patched it to version 2.1 . Lo and behold, it initialised my vooodoo! And crashed 🙁
Then I slowly tried patches and upgrades and read myself through a lot of threads. Finally I came to this conclusion:
On any Directx higher than 6 Pod refuses to start.
The desktop must be set to 16bit to get it to start even if you plan to run it on a voodoo.
AMD processors are bad (read: really really bad) if you want to get it to run. Tried it on a trusty old Intel p3-450 slot processor and it worked (although the mobo was crap, used DX5 and my voodoo2 with patched pod version).
So what does this altogether mean? Maybe a slim win98 "might" have a chance to get it to run with a glidewrapper. Sadly the 3d-functions of a graphics card are crippled inside most virtual machines, otherwise I might give it another shot on my main machine (the voodoo2 doesn´t fit in there because of those stupid raid connectors).

That's REALLY strange. As I said, I'm running POD just fine on my Win98SE machine with a Voodoo3 card.

The only issues I've seen are:
If using Glide (WPOD3DFX.EXE or PODX3DFX.EXE), the game will crash on exit but otherwise play okay.
If using Direct3D (WPODD3D.EXE or PODD3DX.EXE), the game will run fine.
If using DirectDraw (WINPOD.EXE or PODMMX.EXE), if you're in full screen, the game will have the "pitch error" exhibited by X-COM: UFO Defense Gold Edition:
(showthread.php?threadid=576). Either disable DirectDraw acceleration, wait for a fix similar to f0dder's for POD, or hit Alt+Enter to run POD in a window.

And I run DirectX 8.1, too. So I don't think the problem's with DirectX. POD "should" run on AMD processors if you install the Force Feedback patch (if you think otherwise, show me proof! Link?). And I agree with the 16-bit color disclaimer.

Reply 22 of 49, by Stiletto

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Stiletto wrote:

If using DirectDraw (WINPOD.EXE or PODMMX.EXE), if you're in full screen, the game will have the "pitch error" exhibited by X-COM: UFO Defense Gold Edition:
(showthread.php?threadid=576). Either disable DirectDraw acceleration, wait for a fix similar to f0dder's for POD, or hit Alt+Enter to run POD in a window.

Just tried POD (DirectDraw) on a Win98 machine with an ATI 3D Rage chipset, it worked fine. Maybe it's my video drivers or something.

Now to do some Glide wrapper testing... 😀

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

Stiletto

Reply 25 of 49, by Unregistered

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Going back to the Back to Hell thing, I got that as well when I was living in Germany, but I believe it was also released under a separate name in the UK, not as part of Pod Gold.

Anyone got the new URL for QBall's site, incidentally? He moved to an IP a few weeks ago and I forgot to note the address beforehand...

Reply 29 of 49, by Stiletto

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I've enjoyed his rantings since 1997. Quite a lengthy "blog". Longer than the term has been around, at least.

Two of my favorites (that I printed out and saved):
Sunday, Oct 11, 1998 - THERE ARE NO FREE WILLY LUNCHES
http://63.202.139.177:8321/pod/oldnews199810.html

Friday, Nov 13, 1998 - Got a Brain? Don't get mad ... Get even!
http://63.202.139.177:8321/pod/oldnews199811.html
(which links here: http://web.archive.org/web/19990417180027/htt … om/wire/20.html)

Go read some more. 😀

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

Stiletto

Reply 32 of 49, by Unregistered

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Here's how _I_ got POD to work under Win2K and WinXP

First, software mode, the easiest. Make a full or full MMX install (remember to disable DX and Indeo checks in the installer). Enable Win95 compat mode on podmmx.exe (v2.1.0.0). In Win2k you'll need to make a shortcut and enable compat mode on that one. If the compatability tab is not there, enable it by typing "regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll" on the Start->Run prompt. To unregister type "regsvr32 /u %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll" without quotes. If compat mode is NOT enabled, trying to run podmmx.exe will just cause it to crash. However if it IS enabled, all you have to do is click about 40 times or press and hold Enter till the access violation message box disappears. It'll start up normally (you might get the codec warning but it can be ignored) and when you're in the "messed up" menu press Alt+Enter to go to windowed mode. From there proceed to play.

To get Hardware accelerated graphics you'll have to patch the game first, of course. My GFX card is a Geforce2MX and I tried both with old (12.90) and fairly new drivers (40.72WHQL) under Win2k but there was no difference. The patch I used was updatePOD21_d3d-dx5.exe. Install it and enable Win9x compatability mode for the resulting wpodd3d5.exe (v2.2.8.1).
Now comes the real tricky part. REMOVE the POD CD from your drive and put in a DIFFERENT CD instead (any will do). Now start wpodd3d5 and wait till it pops back to the desktop with the "Insert POD CD" message. Replace the one in the drive with the POD CD and WAIT TILL THE DRIVE SPINS UP PROPERLY before proceeding to click OK on the message box. If you don't wait or the drive does not spin up it means that Windows hasn't detected the diskchange, and the application has locked up the drive even if you keep clicking on the OK button. The same thing will occur if you start without any CD in the drive, that's why the swapping method is required, just to make Windows aware of the disk change and stealing the focus back, because when I started with the correct CD POD would simply crash after a few seconds.

Part two, even trickier. If the CD swapping part went OK you should be seeing the the menu screen with the "hand" pointer in the upper left corner and your normal mouse pointer somewhere. To gain mouse focus tap Enter, then Space or vice versa (I forget, sorry). This part took me a couple minutes to figure out and it may cause the game to crash. If it goes well and you have regained mouse control you can proceed as normal. Alas, now comes the disappointing bit. The graphics look shit, ie there is no texturing (or is it blending gone wrong?) anyway, everything is shades of grey and white, including the cars, except that shading seems to work. I didn't bother testing this for too long, but I'm no expert and this wasn't a beautiful sight to behold. It would be interesting to know if this also happens under Win9x or if using an older DX version (6 or 7 maybe, I was using 8.1) would make a difference, or even using a different GFX card (ATI or Matrox).

Finally, I also tried running updatePOD21_3dfx.exe patch over it and added OpenGlide, and to be sure it would start up (making the whole CD swapping mess unnecessary) but it would just sit there with a greenish screen that went darker and brighter every now and then, but I could hear game sound going fine, which leads me to believe that 3DfX could be a viable option. Unfortunately I don't have time to try it out with a real card at the moment. BTW, the OpenGlid.err log was full of invalid operations.

So if anyone has success getting around those issues, either by setting up QFixApp and enabling the right options (half the time I'm clueless as to what they mean) or by using a different GFX card or DX version, please post. And sorry if for some of you part of the info above is redundant, I just wanted to make it as comprehensible and complete as possible.

Reply 37 of 49, by Glidos

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Unregistered wrote:

Finally, I also tried running updatePOD21_3dfx.exe patch over it and added OpenGlide, and to be sure it would start up (making the whole CD swapping mess unnecessary) but it would just sit there with a greenish screen that went darker and brighter every now and then, but I could hear game sound going fine, which leads me to believe that 3DfX could be a viable option. Unfortunately I don't have time to try it out with a real card at the moment. BTW, the OpenGlid.err log was full of invalid operations.

RB3D did that greenish-flashing-screen thing at one stage. I think it was something to do with vertex snapping. Effectively a texture was being stretched so that every part of the screen was being mapped to a single texel in one corner of the texture. The texel was green.

Getting game sounds, and some sort of flashing on the screen, without crashing has to be pretty close to working.

Reply 38 of 49, by Stiletto

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Unregistered wrote:
Here's how _I_ got POD to work under Win2K and WinXP […]
Show full quote

Here's how _I_ got POD to work under Win2K and WinXP

First, software mode, the easiest. Make a full or full MMX install (remember to disable DX and Indeo checks in the installer). Enable Win95 compat mode on podmmx.exe (v2.1.0.0). In Win2k you'll need to make a shortcut and enable compat mode on that one. If the compatability tab is not there, enable it by typing "regsvr32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll" on the Start->Run prompt. To unregister type "regsvr32 /u %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll" without quotes. If compat mode is NOT enabled, trying to run podmmx.exe will just cause it to crash. However if it IS enabled, all you have to do is click about 40 times or press and hold Enter till the access violation message box disappears. It'll start up normally (you might get the codec warning but it can be ignored) and when you're in the "messed up" menu press Alt+Enter to go to windowed mode. From there proceed to play.

To get Hardware accelerated graphics you'll have to patch the game first, of course. My GFX card is a Geforce2MX and I tried both with old (12.90) and fairly new drivers (40.72WHQL) under Win2k but there was no difference. The patch I used was updatePOD21_d3d-dx5.exe. Install it and enable Win9x compatability mode for the resulting wpodd3d5.exe (v2.2.8.1).
Now comes the real tricky part. REMOVE the POD CD from your drive and put in a DIFFERENT CD instead (any will do). Now start wpodd3d5 and wait till it pops back to the desktop with the "Insert POD CD" message. Replace the one in the drive with the POD CD and WAIT TILL THE DRIVE SPINS UP PROPERLY before proceeding to click OK on the message box. If you don't wait or the drive does not spin up it means that Windows hasn't detected the diskchange, and the application has locked up the drive even if you keep clicking on the OK button. The same thing will occur if you start without any CD in the drive, that's why the swapping method is required, just to make Windows aware of the disk change and stealing the focus back, because when I started with the correct CD POD would simply crash after a few seconds.

Part two, even trickier. If the CD swapping part went OK you should be seeing the the menu screen with the "hand" pointer in the upper left corner and your normal mouse pointer somewhere. To gain mouse focus tap Enter, then Space or vice versa (I forget, sorry). This part took me a couple minutes to figure out and it may cause the game to crash. If it goes well and you have regained mouse control you can proceed as normal. Alas, now comes the disappointing bit. The graphics look shit, ie there is no texturing (or is it blending gone wrong?) anyway, everything is shades of grey and white, including the cars, except that shading seems to work. I didn't bother testing this for too long, but I'm no expert and this wasn't a beautiful sight to behold. It would be interesting to know if this also happens under Win9x or if using an older DX version (6 or 7 maybe, I was using 8.1) would make a difference, or even using a different GFX card (ATI or Matrox).

Finally, I also tried running updatePOD21_3dfx.exe patch over it and added OpenGlide, and to be sure it would start up (making the whole CD swapping mess unnecessary) but it would just sit there with a greenish screen that went darker and brighter every now and then, but I could hear game sound going fine, which leads me to believe that 3DfX could be a viable option. Unfortunately I don't have time to try it out with a real card at the moment. BTW, the OpenGlid.err log was full of invalid operations.

So if anyone has success getting around those issues, either by setting up QFixApp and enabling the right options (half the time I'm clueless as to what they mean) or by using a different GFX card or DX version, please post. And sorry if for some of you part of the info above is redundant, I just wanted to make it as comprehensible and complete as possible.

Amazing. Thank you SO much. I (and Craig, I'm sure) will experiment with this one later, now that we have better instructions... BTW, I thought there was a POD version 2.2.9, one of UbiSoft's myriad patches... hmmm....

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

Stiletto

Reply 39 of 49, by Stiletto

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Glidos wrote:

RB3D did that greenish-flashing-screen thing at one stage. I think it was something to do with vertex snapping. Effectively a texture was being stretched so that every part of the screen was being mapped to a single texel in one corner of the texture. The texel was green.

Getting game sounds, and some sort of flashing on the screen, without crashing has to be pretty close to working.

😁 When you get the game, figured out how to apply the patches, and worked on it, LMK. 😀

BTW, Unregistered, did you mean "it started up" as getting to and displaying the in-game menu, and then when you went into a race, the screen went black? Or was the screen black/green at the menu?

Did you try the latest version of OpenGlide?

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

Stiletto