tnt2 ultra and voodoo2 12mb, sb awe64

RCT2 is a 2D Windows game and it still runs properly on XP. The Gold Deluxe edition (which can be had rather cheaoly) even includes all the relevant patches and updates. Personally, I play RCT3 Deluxe instead as it's a 3D game, has more features (including being able to ride the rides in proper 3D simulated modes), better AI and a much better fireworks editor.

But i am looking for a dos video card that is great for early windows and great for dos games and want a video card that can also run roller coaster tycoon 2 which is a lot better than roller coaster tycoon 3 and that is the only windows game made after 2000 that i care about. I don't buy many video games nowadays as the games are boring and these 3d shooters are all the same (seriously these 3d fps shooters are all the same thing) and the only rpg that i like is final fantasy 7. The nfs series has been terrible after porsche unleashed which is the best nfs title ever. What is that video card that has been so called the best dos video card since 1993 or something? I hate tnt video cards. Can someone please name some more good dos video cards? Voodo 2 sounds good though.
Is sound awe 64 backwards compatible with sound blaster 8bit.

[Moved to PC section] He is talking about hardware.

I use a S3 Savage 4 pro card. Despite being designed to compete the TNT, TNT2 and voodoo 3 models (in 1999/2000), the "dos-core" of the chip seems to be similar to the one used with the early S3 Trio series (I would suggest they didn't change very much). So it is quite compatible in dos games (and fast enough). This card also supports the S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) natively, a feature that is somehow forgotten now, but could make classic Unreal somewhere between patches 2.23 and 2.25 really speedy...

abyss wrote:

But i am looking for a dos video card that is great for early windows and great for dos games

Either S3 Virge, Matrox Mystique, or Tseng Labs ET-6000 cards. Note that none of those cards have sufficient capability to play 3D games (Direct3D or OpenGL), so you still need a 3dfx card for such games.

abyss wrote:

and want a video card that can also run roller coaster tycoon 2

IIRC RCT 2 is not 3D --it is isometric like Fallout or Railroad Tycoon 2. Thus, the video cards I've mentioned above should be fine.

abyss wrote:

Can someone please name some more good dos video cards? Voodo 2 sounds good though.

Voodoo2 is not a video card, but a dedicated 3d card --you still need a video card besides the Voodoo2.

abyss wrote:

Is sound awe 64 backwards compatible with sound blaster 8bit.

Yup.

but the mystique while being the second fastest dos card at its time of release (2% slower than the millenium) i know i had one
had very few d3d features and d3d games looked ugly with it

"Mystique was Matrox's most feature-rich 3D accelerator in 1997, but still lacked key features including bilinear filtering, fogging, mipmapping, and true transparency support. Instead, the Mystique uses nearest neighbor interpolation, causing heavy pixelization in textures, and stippled textures for transparency. Without mipmapping support, textures in the distance appear to "swim", waving around and appearing "noisy", because the texture detail wasn't being properly managed and this caused texture aliasing. The company's reasoning for not including the higher-quality features was that performance was more important than visual quality"

Will nfs porsche unleashed run with those video cards. The game was made in 2000 and if the video card can handle that and rct2 then it can handle anything else i plan on running with them.
Can the sound blaster awe64 play sound blaster 16 sounds because i have a 2d windows 95 game that requires 256 colour svga and sound blaster 16.

Yes...awe64 should be fully compatible with sb16

Can the mentioned video cards run a windows game called nfs porsche unleashed which was released in 2000 and if so then i know for sure that the video card is perfect for what i intend to run and can those video cards run nfs high stakes which was released in 1999 in d3d mode ? Which is better the tseng or s3? would using voodo 2 ruin compatibility with some games? Is it dangerous to install direct x 3 then direct x 4 then direct x 5 then direct x 6 then direct x 7 the finally direct x 8.1? That is all of my questions for this topic.

voodoo2 could run pretty much everything up to the hw T&L games of late 2001-early 2002.

Thanks. I know i said that these were all my questions but where can i install older versions of direct x? I want to install direct x 1 then direct x 2 then direct x 3 then direct x 4 then direct x 5 then direct x 6 then direct x 7 then finally direct x 7 to further windows compatibility.

2002 was the time of the R9700. So I'd go for one of those instead, if you are going to play some DirectX 8 games. Not sure how well it will do for DOS stuff. I've never really tried R300 boards out much in DOS.

If you need Glide, get a Voodoo5 5500. Then you can have antialiasing with your Glide.

You wont get better compatibility by installing all those versions of DX. Each version is backwards compatible. You can play Diablo or Jedi Knight 1 in XP with DirectX 9.0c just fine, for example. Compatibility issues are more likely to be caused by using an OS the game doesn't work with. In these cases, you probably will be stuck going to Win9x.

Davros wrote:

"Mystique was Matrox's most feature-rich 3D accelerator in 1997, but still lacked key features including bilinear filtering, fogging, mipmapping, and true transparency support. Instead, the Mystique uses nearest neighbor interpolation, causing heavy pixelization in textures, and stippled textures for transparency. Without mipmapping support, textures in the distance appear to "swim", waving around and appearing "noisy", because the texture detail wasn't being properly managed and this caused texture aliasing. The company's reasoning for not including the higher-quality features was that performance was more important than visual quality"

Hey, you quoted my Wiki efforts! 😀

Thanks for the help.

btw, there's a very capable Glide emulator out there by a fellow who calls himself Zeckensack. I've run quite a few games under it. It even uses pixel shaders to emulate some of Glide's more interesting features/quirks. I've run Wing Commander Prophecy, Diablo 2, and Unreal with it.

http://www.zeckensack.de/glide/

Davros wrote:

but the mystique while being the second fastest dos card at its time of release (2% slower than the millenium) i know i had one
had very few d3d features and d3d games looked ugly with it

Actually, none of the cards I've mentioned has decent 3D capability at all; S3 is a 3D decelerator, Mystique has limited features, while ET-6000 has no 3D features at all, but since abyss is looking for a DOS-capable video card......

However, she also plan to run NFS:PU, then I guess he needs a dual video cards on his system: one to run Direct3D games (Radeon 9700 or newer), while the other is to run DOS games. To be frank, I don't think "new" video cards (2002 and above) like GeForce 5xxxx or Radeon 9xxxx run well for DOS games (if run at all), but correct me if I'm wrong.

swaaye wrote:

If you need Glide, get a Voodoo5 5500. Then you can have antialiasing with your Glide.

What about DOS Glide games?

leileilol wrote:

swaaye wrote:

If you need Glide, get a Voodoo5 5500. Then you can have antialiasing with your Glide.

What about DOS Glide games?

DOS GLide games should be okay as long as they're actually GLide games instead of "Voodoo1-only games" (games that directly access the 3dfx hardware instead of using GLIDE2X.OVL file). However, I think Riboflavin is more knowledgeable in this matter than me.

The only way to guarantee compatibility with all DOS Glide games is probably to get a Voodoo1. Otherwise getting some games to work, if possible at all, will be quite complicated. Voodoo1-specific stuff, especially.

I don't think any DOS Glide games use AA. Certainly not the AA I was referring to with Voodoo5. I think the older Voodoos have edge AA, but I don't know if it was ever used.

Some Verite games used edge AA to great effect, tho! IndyCar Racing 2 and VQuake, especially.