Hi guys... I have made a ton of progress here and had some very good results.. so I'll try and go through it. I will most likely do some tutorial videos on my retro game uTube when I am 100% sure I know what I am doing so I will not go through anything in super detail hear, as there is a strong chance I will find better solutions soon... still this is how it is all shaking out now...
It should be noted that I pretty much ONLY reto-game Adventure Games. As in classic point and click or first person stuff myst type stuff or FMV games. The majority only use light resources when concerned with 3D Acceleration. Though many use it and Direct Draw at least. The point of all this was to try and play cool games often forgotten as they do not run in dosBox or ScummVM.
HOST
- Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz 3.19 GHz
- RAM : 32GB
- Platform : Windows 10 (Home)
86Box-32-bd9b6766 + 86BoxManager_1.7.2
Most videos I looked at recommended PCem17. (I'll get to that latter in the post), but when you go to their site there is a message saying...
Sarah Walker wrote:]14th June 2021
Just a quick note to say that I (Sarah Walker) have decided to call it quits. Thanks to those who sent supportive messages, they're genuinely appreciated. Also thanks to those who have supported me and the project over the last decade or so. If anyone is interested in taking over the project & github repo, please contact me.
So I thought it would be best to get it all working on a active project. So I switched to 86Box, which is still (as far as I know) very active. It is always sad when a project winds down, and I hope someone may pick it up again, but it seemed silly to me to spend ages getting PCem working only for it to never get another update.
Machine Test 1
- Socket 7 (Single Voltage)
- [i430HX] Super Micro Super P55T2S
- Intel Pentium OverDrive MMX : 200
- Max Ram (768)
- 3DFX Voodoo3 3000 (Voodoo Graphics : Unchecked)
- Standard PS/2 Mouse (Config : Wheel)
- Sound Blaster AWE32
- MIDI Output : FluidSynth (FatBoy-v0.790.sf2)
- IDE Controller Duel Channel (Internal Controller)
- 5GB Raw HDrive
- 3.5 1.44m Floppy
- CDROM : ATAPI : 72x
This one seems to work perfectly. There is no sound stuttering during windows loading or the two games I tested (yes that is not a big sample group), dxdiag reported everything ok, no errors, all tests passed fine. Everything but the Voodoo3 was detected, installed and setup automatically.
The BIO needs a little tweaking. You have to run the IDE AutoDetect (or manually set it up) or the CDrive will always be 512megs after install (even if you select large disk support). Also you need to activate the Floppy Drive as well. In addition you need to set the boot order. I used A, CDROM, HDRIVE. Had one issue where if I reboot with a iso loaded into the cdrom and it is not a bootable cd, then the machine will hang on loading and need a reset. Ejecting the CDROM before reboot fixes this. I went into the BIOS and set boot order to A,HDRIVE to stop this from happening.
The version of Windows98se I had was "Windows 98 Second Edition (OEM Full)" from WinWorldpc. It has a bootdisk on the cd and I used it, bypassing the need to a floppy boot.
Everything installed automatically except the Voodoo3. I used "3dfx Voodoo3 3000 Install CD" from oemdrivers. I then also installed Direct X 9.0c
Machine Test 2
I wanted to try a lower spec machine... particularly without using the voodoo3... but I couldn't work out how to get 3D Acceleration to work fully. I was able to get the voodoo2 working if I ticked the box as a 2nd SLI thing, and I tried a few different video cards. S3 types mainly. I could get the 3D Acceleration working on only a few and they would also only do DirectX7... the setup above dose all the way to 9.
Also, the dxdiag tests in the above system all are running 100% with the lowest dip 99%.. all the tests I did with S3 cards, with or without voodoo2 ticked rn arund 50-70%.
If you have a recommended video card setup for 86Box I would appreciate hearing it.
dgVoodoo2
You can download dgVoodoo2 here : http://dege.freeweb.hu/
dgVoodoo2, as I understand it, is a wrapper that allows older games to run in windows without the need for any emulation, basically allowing them to run natively. I was pretty surprised when I was told about this but apparently there are a few other similar projects. As this one was recommended to me and has a dedicated fourm on Vogons I thought I would just use it.
There is not much to say here. I tested it on 5 games. Two of which run kinda in Windows 10, one of which is a steam game and 1 game dose not run at all without a mass headache of tweaking, and 1 steam game. As well as 2 games that I have not seen running ever unless on original hardware.
The games I tested were...
- Sanitarium (Original Disks, not the Gog Version)
- Discworld Nior (Original Disks)
- Quest for Glory 5 (Steam Version)
- Morpheus (Original Disks)
- The Crystal Skull (Original Disks)
dgVoodoo2 was pretty interesting. I found that it seemed to work very well. Quest For Glory 5, Sanitatium and the notoriously hard to get running Discworld Nior both just worked pretty mch instantly.
With Morpheus and Crystal Skull I ran into issue. Namely that neither game would run the installer and I couldn't work out what data files to place into a directory to get running. Both worked perfectly (for the few seconds it was loaded up after install) in 86Box.
I couldn't work out a way to copy data from 86Box back to the Guest. You can write to an img on A: but limited to the size of those old disks. My machine was set to 1.44m.
I think that this is a good way to do it, but only for some games. It seems most of the games I am trying are to old. I will try making a VurtualBox win98... not to use, just to run the installer and then copy the installed folders to the guest and try with this thing.
Basically I would say any game you get off Gog or Steam that is not dos, I would use this "patch" but if you are using original disks, you still need a way to run the install or know how to arrange the datafiles on your drive so the game runs.
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