From the modern patch's readme, changes to DX6 renderer are minimal. When it comes to visuals, it says fog support is restored and dithering is disabled by default for 16-bit modes, which would get you faithful 16-bit look without tricks to try improve the quality given the limitation of available colors, but that's not available in Windows 10 anyway. I haven't tested if compatibility option for emulating 16-bit color modes does anything more than makes the OS pretend that they're available.

There were issues with this game even in old times, eg. see this page. It's unreasonable to expect an old buggy game to work unmodified on a system providing a different environment from what the quirky nature of such games depend on.

FWIW, you can still run and render fine using ancient APIs on modern OS with modern drivers, depends on how you do it. Expecting complete backwards compatibility is also unreasonable, some broken code really only seems to work fine by accident on older systems.

Microsoft is really an exception when it comes to providing backwards compatibility in their systems.

UCyborg wrote on 2020-04-29, 19:57:

From the modern patch's readme, changes to DX6 renderer are minimal. When it comes to visuals, it says fog support is restored a […]
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From the modern patch's readme, changes to DX6 renderer are minimal. When it comes to visuals, it says fog support is restored and dithering is disabled by default for 16-bit modes, which would get you faithful 16-bit look without tricks to try improve the quality given the limitation of available colors, but that's not available in Windows 10 anyway. I haven't tested if compatibility option for emulating 16-bit color modes does anything more than makes the OS pretend that they're available.

There were issues with this game even in old times, eg. see this page. It's unreasonable to expect an old buggy game to work unmodified on a system providing a different environment from what the quirky nature of such games depend on.

FWIW, you can still run and render fine using ancient APIs on modern OS with modern drivers, depends on how you do it. Expecting complete backwards compatibility is also unreasonable, some broken code really only seems to work fine by accident on older systems.

Microsoft is really an exception when it comes to providing backwards compatibility in their systems.

I read that page earlier and I got the idea of using d3d mode. For now, I think I should stick to the Glide mode.

I don't still go to the modern patch because regardless of what API you select, d3d7, d3d6, d3d9, the game will still use Windows D3D9 API. So I expect some changes even if you select d3d6. I think it was done to prevent the problem the game has while communication with d3dim.dll.
Today, I just restored my PC to WinXp from Win10 just to see if it works. Yes it does work indeed with the new hardware but I won't stick there much longer

Srandista wrote on 2020-04-29, 19:02:

If you want to play unmodified, two decades old game, then it's somehow given, that you'll use period correct PC, and not one with OS two decades newer...

Sad thing was NFS3 worked well on DX mode, NFSHS didn't. Well I have been successful in running every game since 1997 without any problem except this one. NFSSE was another one which has problems of the same FTH but they were for the executable files and not DX.

Seems that EA programmers were quite inexperienced. These 2 games even had problems on those period's hardware and software too. For example Geforce 2 and 3 series cards had a black screen issue with HS.

kjliew wrote on 2020-04-29, 19:12:

Discrete_BOB_058 wrote on 2020-04-29, 18:42:

May MS does any complete backwards compatibility thing in the May update 😀

I doubt MS will cater to your wish even if you are genuine paying customer. Games compatibility was the least concerns (or never being one...) for OS upgrades. MS already resorted to emulation by introducing XPMode for the business world. AFAIK, NFS High Stakes is much better on 3Dfx Glide compared to D3D6, and that simply make D3D6 obsolete without much attention from the modding community.

Not quite right, D3D6 mode got attention too .People used other new dll files to get the game running. That way you would get DX6 features from newer apis but those features weren't perfect as the new d3da files had changes with newer direct x Version and so some graphical changes too.

Glide was good, but you didn't get 32 bit color option. So d3d mode was the way to go but in that process you lost/gained some graphics quality by changing the dll. Nothing is perfect for this game now.
I have left all Hopes now.