can you wrap mystique into something common to opengl or to software as you done for s3d-software?

i think you can use s3d to software wrapper for that 😉

btw - i guess someone can check if it is possible to run "FX Fighter 1" files on "FX Fighter 2" (Turbo). There is some big packed file in turbo that might be unpackable or may not 😉.

I know, direct wrapper preferable than building consequences of wrappers.

The way the Mystique API is done it shouldn't be too hard to wrap to some modern API for this game, the more bandwidth you have the less you need to care about texture conversion. Software wrapping should be more straightforward. The new Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended thinking might be able to do an OpenGL conversion if you feed it the reference manual and header file, ideally pruned of stuff the game doesn't use, and ask it the right way. The manual is maybe about 10k tokens in Markdown so not the cheapest thing, but cheaper than a developer.

what about wrapping to something simpler for example glide or dx5 (that could be used together with dgvoodoo)?

If destination API glide or dx5 can show / realize all graphics and effects, opengl surely does cover all

Glide is probably the most bloated of the proprietary APIs, but it doesn't support 4 bit paletted textures anyway so you need to do extra work as with the ViRGE. Ati's Rage API has native support. Legacy OpenGL is pretty simple but I assume you'd want pixel shaders as a minimum to emulate paletted rendering. So that rules out pre-GeForce4 or something like that.

Put together a preliminary software wrapper for Destruction Derby 2 in about half an hour. Feel free to try it out, it only renders the 4 bit textures and only their palette indices, so just black/white, or some other colors depending on your system. But not hard to implement proper palettes, texture filtering etc. No FPS limiter so runs super fast on my modern CPU in a Windows 98 VM. No idea whether the game works on modern Windows, whether some systems would have flicker, and so on. Don't leave the CD in the drive, otherwise you get intro cinematics and an error about no being able to set the DirectDraw video mode.

Seizure warning, if it flickers on your system.

vvbee wrote on 2025-02-27, 11:24:

Put together a preliminary software wrapper for Destruction Derby 2 in about half an hour. Feel free to try it out, it only renders the 4 bit textures and only their palette indices, so just black/white, or some other colors depending on your system. But not hard to implement proper palettes, texture filtering etc. No FPS limiter so runs super fast on my modern CPU in a Windows 98 VM. No idea whether the game works on modern Windows, whether some systems would have flicker, and so on. Don't leave the CD in the drive, otherwise you get intro cinematics and an error about no being able to set the DirectDraw video mode.

Nice Work! I tested it on Windows 10 and works "great" using dgVoodoo or DDrawCompat. By "great" I mean this, of course:

There is also a terrible flicker, as you stated, but the intro movies work fine. Waiting patiently for a more polished version.

@vvbee Does the msi95 wrapper change the Render depth to a larger color palette, since I am not sure if Win10 supports anything lower than 256 colours

The game displays natively in 16 bit color, which is the safest option in case it reads or writes the frame buffer. But it would probably work more or less at 24 bit. I forgot to say the wrapper is intended for non-retro machines, so relatively fast CPUs. Not recommended for epileptics right now apparently.

A slightly more polished version is on offer, but there's now a separate thread for that. Defaults to 32 bit color.

Where is the separate thread? Please, drop here the link.
I'd like to integrate the feature in DxWnd, could you post the source code?

PC Emulation -> Destruction Derby 2 Mystique-to-software wrapper

Updated to add an optimized Glide wrapper for Need for Speed 2 SE. Not tested on real hardware. Runs fast enough with some glitches in an emulator.

vvbee you check private messages on vogons?

Not really...

ok, how about just reading the titles of pms? at least the one from me? 😉