How's the in-race HUD rendering? The tachometer in the bottom right looks to have a bit of crud, as with about all period cards I've tried. Only seen it render correctly on the Matrox G400: https://youtu.be/QxkBWIlDIyE?t=296.

vvbee wrote on 2021-03-04, 01:51:

The tachometer in the bottom right looks to have a bit of crud, as with about all period cards I've tried.

If you referred to the video I showed, then newer Wine versions (>=4.00) which favor "Flip model" sometimes missed to render the tacho bar. The older Wine versions which favor "Blit" model render everything as shown by your G400 video. The screenshot here was captured with Wine-2.0.5. The video was captured with Wine-5.0.3 because the "Flip" model was required to show the on-screen FPS graph overlay.

It is flexible to try and choose the Wine versions that work best for particular games within QEMU Win98 VM. I currently have Wine versions 1.8.7, 1.9.7, 2.0.5, 3.0.5, 4.12.1 and 5.0.3 qualified for QEMU for all Win98/2K/ME/XP VMs.

The screenshot you've got there does show the kinds of graphical issues I mean, like uneven line thickness and/or black pixels around solid bars. Period video cards virtually always have variations of these glitches in this game from what I've seen, save for the software renderer and the G400. I assume at least some of those other cards must've rendered the game correctly at some point in (driver) time, but who knows. Seems to require a very particular render arrangement if Wine reproduces the same issue.

kjliew wrote on 2021-03-03, 22:22:

This is one of the difficult games to get it working on modern system. The game installed ANC32.VXD into the WINDOWS/SYSTEM folder, so I was wondering how those unofficial patches ever made it to work on anything other than Win98/ME. Perhaps access to VxD wasn't the critical path to get the game running.

I don't knnw ho I managed to run this game natively on three different machines, on Windows 7, Windows 10, Windows XP, and all 3 having different hardwares. The game also works on a Windows 8.1 VM. When I checked for a 'AND32.VXD' there was no trace of it in the SYSTEM folder.

All I had to do was install the patch and a no-CD, set the game Windows 98 compatibility and game runs completely fine. It even worked at a higher framerate than QEMU, perhaps 60 on the host machines.

Edit: Is there a way to cap framerate in QEMU? The high framerate in the menu glitches the graphics.

The screenshot was captured with Wine scaled from 800x600 to 1024x768 on 125% Windows 10 desktop scaling. It is true that different GPUs may render slightly different from one another, but that is always subjective to personal taste. I personally do not see any big deals over such graphical issues, they are in no way crippling the experience during game play.

Samples of how the TNT2 and GeForce4 render the HUD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNFDYFBNd-4. Ditto for the S3 Virge and Matrox Mystique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bx_WvxgtL8. Always something glitched. The only thing I see the G400 failing with is that it's missing the background transparency on the red stage progression dot. In terms of the HUD, the Virge looks good too, looking at it now (probably also has the most period-correct drivers).

I personally think the game looks better when everything is glitch-free, but of course it's fun to play regardless.

I am running this with the latest wine and i too have no ANC32.vxd in prefix at all

Bladeforce wrote on 2021-03-04, 10:13:

I am running this with the latest wine and i too have no ANC32.vxd in prefix at all

Probably a different version of the game than what I use. I have no idea over what ANC32.VXD is. And since he was using Voodoo3, which doesn't usually support this from the graphics options, this ANC32.VXD might be somewhat related to it.

The playable demo does the same, it installed QMIXER.DLL and ANC32.VXD into WINDOWS/SYSTEM folder with "Other - Auto-detection" option chosen for graphics adapters. The demo works well on QEMU, too.
https://www.fileplanet.com/archive/p-8254/Colin-McRae-Rally

I used QEMU image snapshot feature to rip game installation and make them portable so that I could test them on Win98/2K/ME/XP VMs easily. In the case of this game, I just moved the 2 files into where the game was installed. My OS image was already prepared with latest DirectX 9.0b for Win98, DX media and Indeo codecs and can be restored in seconds, if needed. When the games happened to install more recent VC redistributables, I simply merged them into the OS image. Otherwise, the OS image stayed clean.

The NoCD patch you used probably bundled with patch to disable OS detection. Otherwise the game would complain about "Wrong Operating System".