VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-03-11, 20:40:

If anyone can point me to the official Xpert 2000 drivers that'd be cool 🤣

Try this one.

An interesting Rage 128 Pro which needs very late drivers

I'm running an Abit IC7-G with Pentium 4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition, so it's all a bit overpowered for the cards in it 😂

If you have the patience, take your pick!

https://archive.org/details/software?query=at … installation+cd

I searched archive.org for Xpert 2000 and not finding much. Will go on a bigger quest later

Righto, I tried the Win98(SE) 4.13.7192 drivers from https://soggi.org/drivers/ati.htm but as before they say "Severe" then say my card isn't compatible.

So I switched to the Beta drivers from that page 4.13.01.8006. They stated they need DirectX8 but I haven't installed that yet. They do install though and say they are 6.73-020627m-004761C-ATI. AGP Support in DxDiag is still "Not Available" but the drivers themselves say bus type is 1x to 4x AGP and current bus setting is 4X.

The graphics corruption in Johnny Herbert is now gone, and can be run with either PowerVR HAL (lots of issues in D3D!) or DirectDraw on ATI card. However, choosing D3D mode on ATI still crashes to desktop, so I suspect it's just badly programmed :-p the only way I could get video of it on YouTube was via PCem!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7XPCWsD4F8

What about here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000303175349/ht … rs/drivers.html

This link takes you to the earliest appearance of the XPERT2000 (4.11.6263) drivers at ATI's site. If necessary, you can cycle forward through the dates to get a later driver until you find the one best for your situation.

I've been wondering if some of my PCX2 non-starters are also Kyro related or driver related. like, I know i've ran Monster Truck Madness on a PCX2 a 1998 ago... and that's a first-gen Direct3D game! Since it involves engines and tires on circuits, maybe you can also look at that? 😜

Anyway, here's some amusing shots of Axis (Jamie, 2000-2001) on PCX2 (Techland SGL MiniGL)

I know MTM has run on a NeoMagic Magicgraph 128 as well, so it's not like it's got high standards.

I grew up on a NeoMagic MagicGraph 128 in my laptop. It's a great 2D card but has no 3D acceleration whatsoever.

Well mine did, must have been the 128XD, but it was only on the level of early S3 or Mach 64GT

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-03-12, 18:56:

Well mine did, must have been the 128XD, but it was only on the level of early S3 or Mach 64GT

Must have been a software renderer.

You could still render 3D, since software renderers were very common at the time. But there there is no DirectX or OpenGL acceleration for this chip.

I'm glad I found a Verite V2100. One of the bests according to Gona's benchmark on Tomb Raider to be paired with a PCX2.
It will be listed in my benchmark.

My PowerVR D3D problem's definitely something about D3DIM. Even forcing DX6.1 on with 4.0.1 drivers don't do a thing about it, and neither does dropping the clocks and limiting to 32mb.

I'd assume it's a HAL conflict one way or another though (PMX2HAL.DLL vs PVRHAL32.DLL vs D3DIM.DLL). Newer D3D stuff works on PCX2, FWIW

"The original driver source code for the PowerVR Series 1 GPUs : Midas arcade, PCX1 and PCX2" dropped on github 15 days ago https://github.com/powervr-graphics/PowerVR-Series1

This is awesome. Maybe we can offload certain kinds of processing on fast CPUs for even better performance.

Interesting. Seems to include sources for the D3D/DDraw driver under MIT license. I don't remember if there was a sample driver available for this. Not sure which pieces are missing, though. Can't find the Win9x VXD.

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-03-23, 12:41:

"The original driver source code for the PowerVR Series 1 GPUs : Midas arcade, PCX1 and PCX2" dropped on github 15 days ago https://github.com/powervr-graphics/PowerVR-Series1

Woohoo! This is great and (at least for me) totally unexpected.

For the most part, the SGL folder is the same SDK released previously by idspispopd here at VOGONS.
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … 431&menustate=0

but the extra PDFs and the driver sourcecode, we've never seen.

I wonder if we can talk them into releasing all hardware documentation on Midas arcade / PCX1 / PCX2 this way?

Great news indeed and totally unexpected. Yet, I've taken a sneak peek of the code and maybe I'm wrong on this one but it seems incomplete - for instance I was unable to trace VxD / vsgl code. Also too bad that the documentation was not released along with the driver (partial) source code...

Stiletto wrote on 2022-03-23, 21:59:

I wonder if we can talk them into releasing all hardware documentation on Midas arcade / PCX1 / PCX2 this way?

I've asked for this some years ago and they said that it was scattered and due to that they are unable to release such, but in the driver source code we can see that timestamps / copyrights were altered so maybe they are working on it and it may be released later? I sure hope so... 😀

There is a similar problem with the source code available from 3dfx. There are files missing that are needed to compile the Windows 98 VxD and Windows 2000 kernel drivers.

While source code that is available may be interesting to examine, if it's not entirely useful if it can't be compiled fully. We would need to recruit someone with the experience necessary to reimplement what is missing.

For example, even though I can compile and modify foreign code, I know nothing about driver development and would he unable to supplement any of the missing dependencies.