marxveix wrote on 2024-04-07, 22:24:

ATi Rage 128 Pro does support paletted textures very well with Win9x, i have tested some DX6 4.11.xxxx and DX7 4.12.xxxx drivers out and they work. Added one 4.11.6745 driver here, that works, just enable paletted textures from D3D menu and thats it, all the magic comes from Ati3draa.dl_ (Ati3draa.dll) driver file that has to support this function.

Interesting. I don't have the card myself, so I was just going from what Ancient Electronics reported in his video. Maybe he used a different driver version?

Anyway, can you test this with the FF8 demo just to be sure? If it works, the external config program should detect paletted textures as supported, and the in-game menu should have proper colors. You can see some examples of that behavior in this post.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-04-08, 06:17:

marxveix wrote on 2024-04-07, 22:24:

ATi Rage 128 Pro does support paletted textures very well with Win9x, i have tested some DX6 4.11.xxxx and DX7 4.12.xxxx drivers out and they work. Added one 4.11.6745 driver here, that works, just enable paletted textures from D3D menu and thats it, all the magic comes from Ati3draa.dl_ (Ati3draa.dll) driver file that has to support this function.

Interesting. I don't have the card myself, so I was just going from what Ancient Electronics reported in his video. Maybe he used a different driver version?

Anyway, can you test this with the FF8 demo just to be sure? If it works, the external config program should detect paletted textures as supported, and the in-game menu should have proper colors. You can see some examples of that behavior in this post.

I already did, i was not able to add more attachment to one post, here is one desktop picture with FF8 config. In game colors i also make screenshot if needed, but it looked ok to me.

Ancient Electronics was using last official DX8 driver 4.13.7192, there are newer and older DX8 drivers available, but for now some 4.11 / 4.12 drivers work for sure.
https://disk.yandex.ru/d/eV600jDAliJ_3w/Win9x … fficial.zip?w=1

marxveix wrote on 2024-04-08, 06:23:

I already did, i was not able to add more attachment to one post, here is one more desktop picture with FF8 config. In game colors i also make screenshot if needed, but it looked ok to me.

I always prefer to look at the in-game screenshot as well. Some cards fake paletted texture support in the driver, which allows them to pass the check in the external config utility, but the end result doesn't look correct in the actual game. Not saying this is the case with the Rage 128 Pro, just that I've seen it before on other cards from that era.

To get that screenshot, start a new game, then press "D" to open the menu, move the cursor to "Config" using the arrow keys, and finally press "X" to open it.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-04-08, 06:31:

marxveix wrote on 2024-04-08, 06:23:

I already did, i was not able to add more attachment to one post, here is one more desktop picture with FF8 config. In game colors i also make screenshot if needed, but it looked ok to me.

I always prefer to look at the in-game screenshot as well. Some cards fake paletted texture support in the driver, which allows them to pass the check in the external config utility, but the end result doesn't look correct in the actual game. Not saying this is the case with the Rage 128 Pro, just that I've seen it before on other cards from that era.

To get that screenshot, start a new game, then press "D" to open the menu, move the cursor to "Config" using the arrow keys, and finally press "X" to open it.

One screenshot with the paletted texture option enabled in the Rage128 Pro D3D menu and other screenshot it is disabled.

marxveix wrote on 2024-04-08, 07:27:

One screenshot with the paletted texture option enabled in the Rage128 Pro D3D menu and other screenshot it is disabled.

Looks good!

I've updated the wiki page to reflect your findings.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-04-08, 07:45:

marxveix wrote on 2024-04-08, 07:27:

One screenshot with the paletted texture option enabled in the Rage128 Pro D3D menu and other screenshot it is disabled.

Looks good!

I've updated the wiki page to reflect your findings.

Paletted textures work with many Rage128 drivers, thats good.

Latest 4.13.8006 Rage128P Win9x driver also work with palleted textures,DX6 up to DX8 drivers have working versions.
Latest Win9x driver: https://soggi.org/files/driver/ATI_Rage-128-P … eta_Win98-ME.7z

https://soggi.org/drivers/ati.htm

From the Atii9xaa.inf or differently named .inf change
HKR,"INFO\INFO\ddhal",Palette,,"0"
to
HKR,"INFO\INFO\ddhal",Palette,,"1"

and palletted textures are automatically enabled after driver install. ATI3DRAA.DL_ (ATI3DRAA.DLL) driver file needs to support palleted textures to make a effect for games.

Rage128 Table fog i cant get with any driver to show up, broken or not. Table fog checkbox is enabled, what else needs to be done? Thief 2 demo and NFS4 i have at the moment. With ATi RageXL i did get broken table fog to show up, but not with Rage128 at the moment.

marxveix wrote on 2024-04-09, 10:24:

Rage128 Table fog i cant get with any driver to show up, broken or not. Table fog checkbox is enabled, what else needs to be done? Thief 2 demo and NFS4 i have at the moment. With ATi RageXL i did get broken table fog to show up, but not with Rage128 at the moment.

You'd have to ask Ancient Electronics.

The screenshots in my post were taken from his video, as I don't have this card myself.

Glover by Hasbro uses Table fog, here's a comparison with or without it on Win7

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-04-11, 20:19:

Glover by Hasbro uses Table fog, here's a comparison with or without it on Win7

Added, thanks!

The Vogonswiki site doesn't talk about table fog support in Amd cards, but Narzoul says it's present in at least the modern AMD cards:
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/issues … mment-323608448
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/commit … cd8537fa41e3564

If someone can provide a screenshot of either Thief 2 or Shadows of the Empire running natively (no wrappers or third-party patches) on a modern(ish) AMD card, I will add it.

The key point is natively. If the driver supports the feature, but it doesn't work in the actual games due to some bug or whatever, I wouldn't consider it functional for the purposes of retro gaming. I don't have a modern AMD card (yet) so I can't check myself.

The best way to test this would be under WinXP, but I think the latest AMD card which works on that OS is the R9 280X or something (not entirely sure). For newer cards, you'll likely need Win7 or later, and I'm uncertain if the aforementioned games can even run natively on those Windows versions.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-04-12, 15:48:

If someone can provide a screenshot of either Thief 2 or Shadows of the Empire running natively (no wrappers or third-party patches) on a modern(ish) AMD card, I will add it.

There is only a written guarantee for now:

Yes, with AMD, fog works even natively in the game.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-04-12, 15:48:

The key point is natively. If the driver supports the feature, but it doesn't work in the actual games due to some bug or whatever, I wouldn't consider it functional for the purposes of retro gaming. I don't have a modern AMD card (yet) so I can't test this myself.

Its not quite a bug, not even quite an unsupported thing. NVIDIA, Intel, AMD have it in driver hardware accelerated; AMD does it correctly; but NVIDIA and Intel have "mis-interpretation" in their drivers:

For the initial identity matrix, UpdateWInfo receives the range (1.0, 1.0). This seems to cause Intel (HD 4600) drivers to inter […]
Show full quote

For the initial identity matrix, UpdateWInfo receives the range (1.0, 1.0).
This seems to cause Intel (HD 4600) drivers to interpret pixel fog ranges as
Z-depth values, while with any other range specified eye-relative (W) depth
is used. The actual values otherwise don't seem to matter with respect to
how fog is rendered.
On AMD (RX 480), eye-relative depth is used irrespective of the W-range.
There is currently no information on how NVIDIA drivers behave, except that
with the default W-range no fog seems to be produced.

This fix replaces the W-range (1.0, 1.0) with (0.0, 1.0) which causes Intel
to also interpret fog range in eye-relative depth with the default identity
projection matrix.

No emulation takes place here.

In easier words, it is like using an GF5 card in Windows 8 and not seeing dithering because Windows 8 doesn't support 16-bit colours; similarly the Nvidia and Intel driver doesn't interpret the matrix co-ordinates as W ranges and rather as Z-depths. The motive is correct, the result isn't

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-04-12, 15:48:

The best way to test this would be under WinXP, but I think the latest AMD card which works on that OS is the R9 290 or something (not entirely sure). For newer cards, you'll likely need Win7 or later, and I'm uncertain if the aforementioned games can even run natively on those Windows versions.

All the table fog games work on my Windows 11, so I am quite certain there's a way to get it working on Windows 7 too

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-04-12, 16:09:

It's not quite a bug, not even quite an unsupported thing. NVIDIA, Intel, AMD have it in driver hardware accelerated; AMD does it correctly; but NVIDIA and Intel have "mis-interpretation" in their drivers:

On the topic of Nvidia, I now have a GTX 970 and can confirm that table fog does work in Thief 2 running natively under WinXP using official 344.11 drivers. It looks crappy due to lack of 16-bit dithering, and you need to uncomment this line in Thief 2's USER.CFG file, otherwise the game tends to crash. Using the same method under Win7, table fog does not render at all.

In that way, I can see what you're saying about the functionality being there, but not working correctly on newer operating systems. I would be curious to see if this is also the case for those AMD cards that have both WinXP and Win7 drivers.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-04-12, 16:36:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-04-12, 16:09:

It's not quite a bug, not even quite an unsupported thing. NVIDIA, Intel, AMD have it in driver hardware accelerated; AMD does it correctly; but NVIDIA and Intel have "mis-interpretation" in their drivers:

On the topic of Nvidia, I now have a GTX 970 and can confirm that table fog does work in Thief 2 running natively under WinXP using official 344.11 drivers. It looks crappy due to lack of 16-bit dithering, and you need to uncomment this line in Thief 2's USER.CFG file, otherwise the game tends to crash. Using the same method under Win7, table fog does not render at all.

In that way, I can see what you're saying about the functionality being there, but not working correctly on newer operating systems. I would be curious to see if this is also the case for those AMD cards that have both WinXP and Win7 drivers.

Well the OP who created the DDrawCompat thread was using a Maxwell card too (750Ti) but table fog didn't work on Win10, so I guess it is some kind of Windows issue with drivers that the driver engineers didn't bother to investigate, but again changing a value from 0 to 1 fixes it so it is "not unsupported". I no longer have my AMD Radeon 5400 card to test, Narzoul's RX480 test holds true for Win10 atleast.

Actual reason behind Thief 2 stars not appearing
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/issues … ment-2150920205

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-06-06, 06:14:

Thief 2 stars issue has been debunked!
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/issues … ment-2150662173

Debunked? It has been known for quite a while that the missing starts in Thief 2 were not caused by the lack of paletted texture support.

It's an unrelated issue specific to GeForce cards. The stars render correctly on every other (non-GeForce) GPU, regardless of whether it supports paletted textures or not.

My theory is that it's related to the mipmap LOD bias. This is one of the most significant driver changes that occurred between the TNT2 and GeForce series of cards. It has a noticable impact in a lot of older DirectX 5 and older titles as well, such as Incoming.

Mipmap settings that fix Incoming (DirectX 5) on the GeForce FX

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-06-06, 06:28:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2024-06-06, 06:14:

Thief 2 stars issue has been debunked!
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/issues … ment-2150662173

Debunked? It has been known for quite a while that the missing starts in Thief 2 were not caused by the lack of paletted texture support.

It's an unrelated issue specific to GeForce cards. The stars render correctly on every other (non-GeForce) GPU, regardless of whether it supports paletted textures or not.

I changed my post yet again, but yes, a driver thing

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-06-06, 06:44:

My theory is that it's related to the mipmap LOD bias. This is one of the most significant driver changes that occurred between the TNT2 and GeForce series of cards. It has a noticable impact in a lot of older DirectX 5 and older titles as well, such as Incoming.

Mipmap settings that fix Incoming (DirectX 5) on the GeForce FX

Actual reason
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/issues … ment-2150920205

Respectfully, I don't think you understand the meaning of the word "debunked".