All true about Linux, sadly. The state of hardware and drivers was a mess, the lack of standardized APIs made writing many applications a headache, and there just wasn't the critical mass of users available to sustain a company whose sole job was porting games. I will say that I bought my Linux copy of Quake III Arena, and that it worked beautifully.

I know there was at least one crazy Rendition-using friend of mine who used a Glide-->RRedline wrapper for playing UT99, and that it managed cheerfully at 512x384 or so, with a mix of low and medium detail settings.

You can run Unreal in D3D mode but it looks ugly due to bugs and missing features. It also runs pretty slow, but so does that wrapper.

My guess is that a real RRedline renderer could maybe match Glide and match what a Voodoo1 can do. Of course this might be wishful thinking. I'm not sure how well V2000 handles the effects Unreal uses or if RRedline is as good as Glide.

I'm told Swaaye is "The Man" when it comes to Rendition Verite knowledge... so maybe you could take a peek at my other thread and give me some insight, please? I'll just link you to it.. easier than re-typing everything i've already typed over there: Re: Rendition Verite in pure dos help please?

What a good finding swaaye! 😀
You have found Royce Liao's page - author of the v2dosfix (this program patches Verite V1000-accelerated DOS games for the Verite V2x00) - with downloads:
http://reocities.com/siliconvalley/campus/649 … til/myutil.html

Thanks to your other thread. 😀

I'm kinda bummed that your V1000 Quake 2 screen captures in your other thread didn't work, but I then read somewhere that the V1000 renderer (which I assume is the same as the "Verite OpenGL" renderer?) doesn't do colored lighting, so more or less it just looks like software rendering with bilinear filtering.

Good enough for the first usable 3D accelerator though 😀 Too bad these don't show up on ebay that often

Yeah the captures were simply blank. I think they made an RRedline to Mini-OpenGL wrapper and it's not compatible with screenshots. That's correct that there's no colored lighting. See the Permedia 2 shots for examples of what that looks like.

There is actually a full OpenGL ICD for the V1000 but it's so slow that it's not worth considering for much of anything. It might allow screenshots though.

Got my Stealth II S220 in the mail today. $14 shipped, not bad.

So far just messing around with the VGA core; it's okay but even on my P4 machine Wolf3D doesn't run as smoothly as it does with my other cards. Are the reference drivers (on the first page of this thread) really the best ones to use?

EDIT: Doesn't seem to like my LCD monitor too much, get an "out of range" message when playing full-screen Windoze games. Is there any way to permanently keep the refresh rate at 60 Hz or would there be another recommended driver? vQuake works fine from a pure DOS startup, however.

Try out the Diamond drivers. They are older but have better refresh rate control and may even have fewer bugs than the betas. Those drivers are in the big Rendition file pack I have for download.

In DOS, yeah non VESA modes are incredibly slow. Slower than slow Trident cards. If the game uses plain old Mode 13, there is a util called 'renutil' that can speed that one up. Mode X is stuck being awful, sadly.

Thanks swaaye, the Diamond drivers solved my refresh rate issue, although OpenGL games are still quite flakey.

Anyways I went and tested some games just to see how this thing runs:

vQuake (Anti-aliasing enabled):

No problems here. Default gamma is quite dark though.

Blood 2: Feels like 1-2 fps at 640x480x16 with all settings maxed out

Descent 3 (D3D): Not really playable with the settings maxed out. Some depth problems. In-game text also looks garbled

Evolva: Optimized for DX7 (HW T&L) cards - surprisingly runs nicely (though the textures themselves aren't all that high-res), but severe graphical problems rendering transparent objects (i.e. plants) - most noticeable when moving

GLQuake: Used Rendition's MiniGL driver. No problems. Looks very much like vQuake, except with the added ability for transparent water and lack of anti-aliasing option. Particles are also filtered by default

Hellbender: One of the earliest D3D games, so naturally I expected it to run without any problems.

Shogo: Uses the same LithTech engine as Blood 2 so pretty much the same results - not too playable with settings maxed out

Terracide: It's a 1997 game so no problems.

Turok: No problems. Sky looks funny but it also does even on the latest NVIDIA/ATI cards using the D3D renderer

Turok 2: No major problems. Menu text looks slightly funky but still readable.

Other stuff I attempted to test:

Half-Life: Can't get the MiniGL driver to work with it. D3D works fine though
MechWarrior 3: Crashes when loading any campaign
Quake 3 Arena: Freezes at id logo screen (using beta ICD)
Unreal Gold: D3D mode reverts to software mode

UPDATE: Finally got some stuff working with the ICD.

Half-Life: (D3D)

No major problems except for some minor texture corruption that occurs (noticeable when moving). Runs around 15-20 fps

Half-Life: Opposing Force (OpenGL ICD)

No major problems. Runs around 20-25 fps (peak)

MDK2: (OpenGL ICD)

Title screen and loading screens all appear white. Some loading screens still okay. Cutscenes seem okay. Some textures look wrong. Runs about 5-15 fps

Quake 2: (MiniGL)

No problems here. Like vQuake and GLQuake, default gamma is very dark. I don't know what's worse - the darkness or the over-exposed brightness that the Voodoo2 reference drivers give by default.

Quake 3 Arena: (ICD)

Here's where it got really fun. Locks up in fullscreen mode. Only runs in windowed mode - had to modify the config file to start up that way. Title screen appears blank, only showing menu options. Runs about 10-15 fps when no bots are around

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (ICD)

Game does not recognize the graphics card (only the name of the card from the OpenGL driver). Locks up in fullscreen mode. Only runs in windowed mode - had to modify the Safe Mode script and start up using that. Trees and other transparent objects look funny (lack of per-pixel MIP mapping?). Changing weapons is like watching a slideshow. Runs about 1-10 fps.

Other stuff that didn't work:

Doom 64 EX: Complains about missing OpenGL extension (using ICD)
Soldier of Fortune Platinum: Freezes upon starting up (using ICD)
Unreal Tournament GOTY: D3D mode reverts to software mode, OpenGL renderer crashes game (ICD)

I'm also aware that there's a beta OpenGL renderer for the original Unreal, however, it doesn't seem to work with newer versions. I don't have a "non-Gold" copy.

Need to find some more RRedline/Speedy3D games too. The only other game that I have that seems to have an RRedline renderer is MechWarrior 2 Titanium (which itself is based off the Mercs engine), though it looks just about the same as D3D mode.

2D is also surprisingly clean and sharp at my LCD monitor's 1280×1024 native resolution. Still some noticeable "weaving" occurs, but it's not to the point of annoyance. Also successfully flashed the card's BIOS so that it effectively becomes a V2200, but it doesn't really make much of a difference.

nice collection of shots and info!

I have had Half Life working in GL mode before. Either with the miniGL or the full ICD. But it is ugly due to the per poly mipmapping. This causes textures to pop into place at each polygon as you move around and the game swaps detail levels.

Serious Sam appears to just lack mipmapping entirely which gives tons of texture noise and aliasing.

Yeah I've noticed the popping texture issue can get quite annoying after a while. 🙁

Also I should mention that Serious Sam's menu background is not properly rendered, and the game also crashes with an error message upon exiting. The First Encounter also has similar behavior to the above, although it runs a wee bit faster.

Risen3D gives an error message stating "Outdated hardware: no gamma support" (dubya tee eff)

Had a bit of fun with ePSXe as well (using Pete's D3D6 GPU plugin) - Disruptor just flat out looks like ass. The movies and intro play fine, but menus have no text and textures are all wrong and the objects and enemies all appear as gray squares.

Can't get Descent 3 to detect the OpenGL renderer, even after creating a backup of the opengl32.dll in the system folder and replacing it with Rendition's ICD.

Funny how they called them "Gold" OpenGL drivers, eh? 😉

More like cold if you ask me. 😉 I must admit though, these 1997 cards are quite fun to tinker with (I could only imagine that the only thing more fun than this is the V1000). Everything running the way it should out of the box = boring.

I am also happy to report that Rebel Moon (the original) works fine after using the V2DOSFIX utility. Runs very nicely and looks nice too, though it was expected. Couldn't figure out how to properly capture screenshots though. 🙁 Also requires the system to be in DOS mode. I believe this game shipped only with the Creative 3D Blaster PCI and VLB cards, which is why there's also an option for CGL (it uses Speedy3D by default, but you can also force software rendering with the -vga command line option).

Also played around with ePSXe some more, this time using Pete's OpenGL plugin - it actually looks worse. Project 64 seems to complain about the lack of a supported D3D card.

Still though, Rendition >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> S3.

A Virge GX or DX are interesting competition for V1000. But the drivers are so awful for S3 and few games work. No OpenGL at all.

For a N64 emulator you can try Corn. It only runs Mario64 really well though. PCX2 can sort of play Corn, albeit with severe Direct3D sorting issues.

I wish Corn corntinued... it had great potential for being the only n64 emulator that was fast as hell 🙁

Yep, funny too how they used to be the comsumer "graphics king" too until 3D acceleration went mainstream.

Corn unfortunately crashes my system (using either l or h executable). It'd probably work better on my Celeron 400, although I have no method of getting files onto that thing right now. Perhaps UltraHLE with a Glide to D3D wrapper might work? Don't know, but we'll see. I could only expect it to be a crapshoot.

Anyways, here's some more screenshots:

BANG! Gunship Elite (D3D): A game from 2000 that was praised for its stellar graphics (but so-so gameplay), runs nicely if you set the texture settings to a quarter of the max. size - no major problems here (still looks amazing nonetheless at low detail). Pretty sluggish at max. settings.

Heavy Gear 2 (D3D): Again, need to tone down the settings as low as possible for a decent enough frame rate. No major problems, but texture popping can get annoying.

MechWarrior 2 Titanium (RRedline): Being the RRedline renderer, everything should work properly. Texturing not quite as smooth as running on a "better" card.

Twisted Metal 2 (D3D): Another 1997 game so no problems. Playable at high detail. Smoke clouds look absolutely non-transparent (as you can see). I'm not sure if it's supposed to look that way, but with the game being ported from the PSOne I wasn't expecting too much.

System Shock 2 (D3D): Graphics options are pretty limited (only resolution and gamma). Playable at default settings (~20-25 fps).

Pippy: Nice screenshots. What are the stats of the system hosting the card?

I wonder how well Deus Ex would run. It uses the UT engine, though, so likely to run into the same problems you experienced with that.

HunterZ wrote:

Pippy: Nice screenshots. What are the stats of the system hosting the card?

I wonder how well Deus Ex would run. It uses the UT engine, though, so likely to run into the same problems you experienced with that.

It's a P4 1.8 with 512 MB on Win98 SE, so sorta cheating, but it doesn't seem these cards scale well from PCI (and fill rate) limitations. I would imagine a high-end PII machine (typical from its era and I believe are the "recommended" requirements for the most newest games shown here) would produce the same results. Also, running vQuake on the V2x00 more or less will produce the same performance as if it were running on a V1000 card.

I could probably get UT-based games to run if I use a custom renderer, or by using the reference drivers instead (I think swaaye managed to get Unreal Gold to run in D3D so I can only conclude that he was using a completely different driver set), however the reference drivers don't play too well with my monitor.