Back around when it was released then it was great but it hasn't been developed since unlike nglide and dgvoodoo.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-07, 16:42:

The first time I used a Glide wrapper was in 2017, for NFS High Stakes. The Expansion Pack mod provided zeckensack's Glide wrapper or nGlide to choose and I chose the latter. Years since then I have always used nGlide and dgVoodoo2.

Today I decided to give it a go, tested 3 games, always had OpenGL ICD crash. Maybe Windows 11 doesn't like it anymore. Is there anything I am missing out by not using zeckensack's Glide wrapper. How was your experience back when you used it?

Last released version of zeckensack's wrapper is from 2005, so not too surprising it has issues in Windows 11.

I used it back in the day, and it worked. I personally can't remember anything notable about it, but I seem to recall it having decent performance on slower/less featured hardware from what I recall reading (this came at expense of accuracy, AFAICR).

It's probably the best Glide Wrapper circa 2005. It's highly optimized and is designed to work across DirectX 7-9 level cards. It has feature settings to get the most from each generation. It will use the hardware palletized texture support of GeForce FX. And it's primarily for Win98 through XP.

zeckensack's Glide wrapper still works fine in Windows 7 and on DX11 video cards like Fermi.

Before Zeckensack, glide wrapping was more just 'ultrahle wrapping' with a lot of them not making development past Y2K. The only other relatively mature wrapper in that time was psVoodoo.

Of course Win10+ etc will break older glide wrappers as they deprecate graphics APIs those wrappers rely on.

darry wrote on 2022-10-07, 17:01:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-10-07, 16:42:

The first time I used a Glide wrapper was in 2017, for NFS High Stakes. The Expansion Pack mod provided zeckensack's Glide wrapper or nGlide to choose and I chose the latter. Years since then I have always used nGlide and dgVoodoo2.

Today I decided to give it a go, tested 3 games, always had OpenGL ICD crash. Maybe Windows 11 doesn't like it anymore. Is there anything I am missing out by not using zeckensack's Glide wrapper. How was your experience back when you used it?

Last released version of zeckensack's wrapper is from 2005, so not too surprising it has issues in Windows 11.

I used it back in the day, and it worked. I personally can't remember anything notable about it, but I seem to recall it having decent performance on slower/less featured hardware from what I recall reading (this came at expense of accuracy, AFAICR).

Hmm that's what I have heard too. Besides I saw it had profiles for different games. Maybe it was also implementing the original driver configuration for each game in itself too?

swaaye wrote on 2022-10-07, 20:20:

It's probably the best Glide Wrapper circa 2005. It's highly optimized and is designed to work across DirectX 7-9 level cards. It has feature settings to get the most from each generation. It will use the hardware palletized texture support of GeForce FX. And it's primarily for Win98 through XP.

Too bad I don't have a GeForce FX era card

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-10-07, 20:40:

zeckensack's Glide wrapper still works fine in Windows 7 and on DX11 video cards like Fermi.

I have an iGPU based Win7 system still, I should check how it fares there...

leileilol wrote on 2022-10-08, 04:12:

Before Zeckensack, glide wrapping was more just 'ultrahle wrapping' with a lot of them not making development past Y2K. The only other relatively mature wrapper in that time was psVoodoo.

Of course Win10+ etc will break older glide wrappers as they deprecate graphics APIs those wrappers rely on.

I tested psVoodoo too today ad it crashes in the games where I did. It was also pretty incomplete as to what the log says, unsupported operations...

The Zeckensack's Glide wrapper even works on cards from DX7 .. I use it with the game (Need For Speed 2 - SE).
Screenshot from the GeForce 2 MX 200 card (Win XP , AMD Duron 750 MHZ)

There was a streamer on Twitch who was playing Unreal (not Gold, actual original retail pressing), straight from the CD without patches, and I had to direct them to zeckenzack's wrapper just for it to run with any semblance of hardware acceleration.

There were some bugs on the GeForce 3 he was running with but it worked nonetheless. This old glide wrapper is very useful for old Windows XP era machines at the time, nGlide and dgvoodoo2 are more suited for far more modern systems.

DracoNihil wrote on 2022-10-19, 22:47:

There was a streamer on Twitch who was playing Unreal (not Gold, actual original retail pressing), straight from the CD without patches, and I had to direct them to zeckenzack's wrapper just for it to run with any semblance of hardware acceleration.

There were some bugs on the GeForce 3 he was running with but it worked nonetheless. This old glide wrapper is very useful for old Windows XP era machines at the time, nGlide and dgvoodoo2 are more suited for far more modern systems.

I am intrigued as to how well these wrappers performed since the start. Probably everything started following UHLE's leads and slowly turned towards accuraccy.

This page is good reading.
http://www.zeckensack.de/glide/readme.htm

swaaye wrote on 2022-10-20, 18:38:

This page is good reading.
http://www.zeckensack.de/glide/readme.htm

Does anybody know how the author is doing ? The website looks like it hasn't been updated in 15 or so years, but clearly somebody has been paying the server and domain hosting all this time .

Sorry for necroposting. But now Zeckenzack and all hompages and links are totally gone. Zophar domain hosts version 0.82 but do any of you have the latest 0.84c version to download.

It seems archived in archive.org.

Archive.org link was broken. But at least I got the original filename. Glidewrapper084c.exe so googled that and got.

https://ut-files.com/Video_Renders/Glide/

I think that google.com is supressing archive.org search results. It is not the first time.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2025-10-13, 04:17:

Sorry for necroposting. But now Zeckenzack and all hompages and links are totally gone. Zophar domain hosts version 0.82 but do any of you have the latest 0.84c version to download.

That's crazy, I was on that page just fine a few months ago to help another friend from Twitch run Unreal 1 with stable 3D acceleration.

Well now it is history. It is only our burden to archive that to our hard drives and usb sticks and sd cards until we die and our not so close siblings will throw it all on a landfill.

I'm more surprised that it was active for so long. The latest version is still accessible via Web Archive too.