The latest release seems to have completely broken my build. I'm running VirtualBox 6.0.24 and the previous release (the 7/10 release) seemed to do nicely for most things I was running. The GLChecker worked great, showing I had HW acceleration as did dxdiag, showing blazingly fast D3D support.

The first (albeit minor) issue is that the mouse cursor has, for some reason, become extremely tiny. I tried running GLChecker and it simply froze everything, never launching. I ran dxdiag, and it starts to load but then eventually just stops loading. I can't get any further with either.

Reverting back to version 14 from version 18 fixed everything.

EriolGaurhoth wrote on 2023-09-01, 13:18:

The latest release seems to have completely broken my build. I'm running VirtualBox 6.0.24 and the previous release (the 7/10 release) seemed to do nicely for most things I was running. The GLChecker worked great, showing I had HW acceleration as did dxdiag, showing blazingly fast D3D support.

The first (albeit minor) issue is that the mouse cursor has, for some reason, become extremely tiny. I tried running GLChecker and it simply froze everything, never launching. I ran dxdiag, and it starts to load but then eventually just stops loading. I can't get any further with either.

Reverting back to version 14 from version 18 fixed everything.

Update: I tried running the newest driver package on the newest VirtualBox (7.0.10) and while the testing does work in this version (GLChecker and dxdiag are fine), the mouse issue persists. Not only is the mouse cursor extremely small, but when I try to play something like Unreal Gold, the mouse is only available for the top quarter of the screen, and once I move the cursor down, it completely disappears. Clearly there's some kind of bug that completely breaks earlier versions of VirtualBox and wrecks mouse functionality of the newest version.

After installing the new SoftGPU driver, Windows 98 installed in VMWare Workstation Player 16.2.5 now flatly refuses to boot and writes "EMM386 Unrecoverable privileged operation error #01".

If I select B, the virtual machine will still not start, and if I select C, it will crash to the host's desktop.
Disabling CD, Floppy, network adapter, sound card, 3D acceleration and enabling Intel VT-X/EPT and AMD-V/RVI do not help.
What to do?

*********

upd: Thanks to all! Unfortunately, I had to re-create the virtual machine and install Windows 98 into it, but during installation I did not check the "Enable SSE/AVX hack" checkbox. As it turned out, it is because of this option that Windows 98 does not boot for me.

Rust ported to Windows 95 (and NT)
Of course not official and would potentially require it's own maintenance whereas Mingw w/GCC or mingw-w64 w/GCC are more supported.

When I run Windows 98 on VirtualBox 6.0.24 I get this problem:

Driver update didn't help. VMSVGA video adapter.
How to fix it?

I would suggest trying VirtualBox 7 as it seems SoftGPU is currently more taliored to it, rather than VirtualBox 6 or VMware.
As for mouse issues, is the pointing device set to PS/2 Mouse? To smoothen the mouse you can try PS2Rate utility.
Or select your real USB Mouse from USB menu.

MrMateczko wrote on 2023-09-03, 19:44:

I would suggest trying VirtualBox 7 as it seems SoftGPU is currently more taliored to it, rather than VirtualBox 6 or VMware.

I would love to, but in VirtualBox, in addition to Windows 98, I also have Windows XP (and there, starting from version 6.1, there is no support for 3D acceleration). In addition, some games work best in the same Windows XP that is installed in VirtualBox (for example, in the game Mickey Saves the Day on VMWare Player 16.2.5 there are no characters at all, and in The Simpsons Hit and Run Homer's car dyed black instead of pink).
When SoftGPU will take over the development of the driver for XP is unknown. Using a real computer is not an option.

Burinis wrote on 2023-09-03, 21:28:

in the game Mickey Saves the Day on VMWare Player 16.2.5 there are no characters at all, and in The Simpsons Hit and Run Homer's car dyed black instead of pink)...

...Using a real computer is not an option.

Why is that? Mickey seems to be running just fine on Windows 10, and if some issues do pop up at some point, you can use dgvoodoo2. Besides, it's a Windows 9x compatible Direct3D 7 game, so I don't see why you insist on running it on XP.

For Simpsons, again, a wrapper like dgvoodoo2 or d3d8to9 on modern windows can do the job, and if that's not enough, there's a community made launcher that not only wraps it to D3D9 but also fixes bugs, adds modern aspect ratios, resolutions, MSAA, etc.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Simpsons:_Hit_%26_Run

eddman wrote on 2023-09-04, 12:20:

Why is that? Mickey seems to be running just fine on Windows 10, and if some issues do pop up at some point, you can use dgvoodo […]
Show full quote

Burinis wrote on 2023-09-03, 21:28:

in the game Mickey Saves the Day on VMWare Player 16.2.5 there are no characters at all, and in The Simpsons Hit and Run Homer's car dyed black instead of pink)...

...Using a real computer is not an option.

Why is that? Mickey seems to be running just fine on Windows 10, and if some issues do pop up at some point, you can use dgvoodoo2. Besides, it's a Windows 9x compatible Direct3D 7 game, so I don't see why you insist on running it on XP.

For Simpsons, again, a wrapper like dgvoodoo2 or d3d8to9 on modern windows can do the job, and if that's not enough, there's a community made launcher that not only wraps it to D3D9 but also fixes bugs, adds modern aspect ratios, resolutions, MSAA, etc.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Simpsons:_Hit_%26_Run

It's just that I'm afraid to accidentally install old libraries (suddenly the installer won't allow it) designed for old Windows, and thereby ruin my Windows 10. That's why I prefer to "experiment" in virtual machines. And, as for me, it's better to run games on "native" operating systems. I'm not considering buying an old PC yet. Does anyone else know how to fix this issue?

Burinis wrote on 2023-09-04, 16:22:

It's just that I'm afraid to accidentally install old libraries (suddenly the installer won't allow it) designed for old Windows, and thereby ruin my Windows 10.

I haven't encountered an XP era game that ruins Windows 10, except for those that have Starforce protection, which is a relatively short list. http://redump.org/discs/system/pc/quicksearch … protection/only

As far as I can tell, DirectX 8 and higher games cause no issues with Windows 7 and up. (I've also installed dozens of DX7 and older games with no adverse effect, but that's another matter)

You can also create a VM with Windows 10 and test the game there. If everything is fine, then you can install it on the host, or you can just play it in the VM itself.

If the game you want to play is pre-XP and comes with DirectX 7 or older, then you don't need XP in the first place. Windows 98 with SoftGPU should handle those.

What is the "compatibility enhancements" option for?

eddman wrote on 2023-09-04, 17:55:

Burinis wrote on 2023-09-04, 16:22:

It's just that I'm afraid to accidentally install old libraries (suddenly the installer won't allow it) designed for old Windows, and thereby ruin my Windows 10.

I haven't encountered an XP era game that ruins Windows 10, except for those that have Starforce protection, which is a relatively short list. http://redump.org/discs/system/pc/quicksearch … protection/only

As far as I can tell, DirectX 8 and higher games cause no issues with Windows 7 and up. (I've also installed dozens of DX7 and older games with no adverse effect, but that's another matter)

Unfortunately, everything is not so smooth for me: I managed to hardly get Sims 2 to work without failures in 64-bit Windows 10, but SimCity Societies and the Russian “Petka 007” crash after a certain period of time.

Burinis wrote on 2023-09-08, 08:28:

Unfortunately, everything is not so smooth for me: I managed to hardly get Sims 2 to work without failures in 64-bit Windows 10, but SimCity Societies and the Russian “Petka 007” crash after a certain period of time.

You were talking about "ruining" windows 10, not how the games run. I specifically wrote that XP compatible games do not ruin/break it (except for those in that link).

As for making older games run, pcgamingwiki has a lot of information on that. You could also directly ask for help on their forums or discord server.

Besides, both of those Sims games apparently use D3D9.0c, so they should work under XP in VMWare. If not, try Vista.

No idea about the russian game. (EDIT:) If you check the link I posted, you'd see this game has Starforce.

eddman wrote on 2023-09-07, 13:28:

What is the "compatibility enhancements" option for?

Those are registry entries to make some software more compatible. You can check them in softgpu.ini under [fixes] category.

I don't know if it's just me but from what I've noticed after using softgpu on both vbox and vmware are several things:
1. VMware is snappier compared to virtualbox, animations are instantaneous almost.
2. Enabling 3D acceleration on tasks before the driver is initialized (install, dos mode, second stage) on vmware makes them almost unusable.
3. VMware hates VxD drivers for the SB128 as most drivers BSOD the VM during the install. Eax seems to work with half-life at least, but under the WDM drivers, the latency is so bad.
4. VBox seems to be more stable than VMware. Recently, after updating the drivers, there are times where vmware would lock up and refuse to boot resulting in a black screen.
5. Under VMware, openGL seems to perform better as serious sam on normal settings performs better. But on VBox, D3D seems to perform better under the VMSVGA device. Serious sam performs worse at the same settings regardless of resolution. Unreal works fine on VMware under D3D, while on VBox, I need to use nGlide in order to play it.
6. Dualshock 4 passthrough works fine under VBox, while VMware doesn't work for some reason. Even with nUSB.

Both observations were done on VMware Workstation 17.0.2 and VirtualBox 7.0.10 respectively.

1. Anyone compared performance a same game with this and in PCem/86box (and/or Dosbox)?
2. Where do a huge amount of likes for this project?

The game The Adventures of Lomax makes Windows give an error "Could not find context for" on Windows ME with SoftGPU. Entire computer becomes unstable and computer needs a reset

2mg wrote on 2023-10-30, 21:52:

1. Anyone compared performance a same game with this and in PCem/86box (and/or Dosbox)?

Only for a few games. Thus far I've done an informal (i.e. not with exact benchmarking) test of Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Rogue Squadron 3D, and Need for Speed 3. My PC host is an intel i7 11800H running Windows 11 with 64 GB of RAM and a 6GB NVIDIA RTX 3060.

I've used 2 PCem setups: A socket-7 ASUS P/I-P55T2P4 with an Intel MMX 200, 256 MB RAM, Phoenix S3 Trio64 + Voodoo2 SLI and Socket 8 Intel VS400FX with a Pentium Pro 200, 256 MB RAM and Voodoo3 3000. I would have used faster emulated CPUs, but the emulated CPU performance drops way down into the 60% to 80% range on those games using PII emulation, but I get close to 100% with the 200MHz CPUs. My SoftGPU setup is with the latest VirtualBox build (7.1)

The thing to know about PCem vs VirtualBox is that they seemingly have the exact opposite bottlenecks: VirtualBox's virtualized CPU is blazingly fast, but SoftGPU under OpenGL, DirectX, and/or OpenGlide wrapper all render the graphics seemingly slower than the virtual Voodoo GPUs of PCem, at least they seemed a lot choppier for me. Meanwhile, PCem has a massive CPU bottleneck, where the rendering seems to do well, but only being able to run a maximum 200MHz CPU with my machine is what slows everything down. This was evident especially in running the Uneal games, as they ran slightly better on PCem. Rogue Squadron was a different story where on VirtualBox the game ran ridiculously fast, where I'd have to throttle the virtualized CPU somehow to get it to run at a playably slow speed, whereas PCem had the opposite problem of running the game a bit too slowly. Need for Speed 3 ran better in VirtualBox + softgpu, with one caveat: I had to turn off Z-buffering, because it made everything a pale shade of white. Other than that, it ran faster and the rendering was just as good as PCem.

I feel like the perfect emulation solution that, to my knowledge does not yet exist for emulating Windows 95-Windows ME games (basically the 3dfx era in general) would be something that does HLE for the CPU, something closer to VirtualBox's virtualization than what low-level PCem/86Box does and does LLE of the GPU, something closer to how PCem/86Box handles and recognizes Voodoo cards as opposed to the seemingly hacky nature of SoftGPU. It's also a bit trickier to setup softGPU, having to make sure you have the right dlls in the game folder, often having to hack the registry of a game to trick it into thinking you have a voodoo card when you're using an OpenGlide wrapper (as was the case with NFS 3). Thus far, I haven't found anything close to that, but if SoftGPU continues in the right direction and works out the bugs, I'm hopeful it'll still be better than PCem/86Box, it's just not there yet.

A question not necessarily regarding SoftGPU but for Mesa9x.

I noticed there's a new experimental release supposed to have added NT3/4 support. I just checked the opengl32.dll from that version on a NT 3.51 VM and confirmed there's no dependency problem.

The problem is I don't know how to test your Mesa9x on such old Windows NT system to verify its functionality. Can it be used with a generic VESA driver (VBEMP or boxvnt)?

Awesome job, thanks!

Is it possible to passthrough a real pci soundcard, for ex. SBLive?

Cheers