Greetings - ive got qdos, a voodoo 2 and a p3 550 mhz.
The AGP card is a GF FX5500. The qdos page says that mtrrlfbe can speed up my qdos voodoo 2 experience.
But mtrrlfbe does not list my voodoo 2, just my GF.
The Voodoo2's framebuffer is not used for the operations the "combined writing"-tool mtrrlfbe was designed for.
It's just there for the result of its internal rasterization and not the cpu's.
In contrast the GeForce has a frame buffer the cpu can manipulate and, if supported, use combined writing operations on.
Qdos loads pretty quickly on my p4 rig with a voodoo2. You don't need to use emm386 and that may be causing your loading problem. I use the mesa driver (not fxmesa or sage) and enable multitexturing with the -mtex command line argument. Multitexturing does seem to cause a few slowdowns in some specific rooms (like when selecting episode 2 on the first map) but also gives a 20-30% fps boost in general on my rig, despite what the readme claims. Also, you may have figured this all out since your post was from March 🤣.
Official Glide libraries actually automatically enable write-combining on the framebuffer with Intel CPUs to provide speed-up in some scenarios. On the Voodoo2, it sets 8 MB from the physical memory address of the card to WC, then the first 4 KB of that address is set to uncacheable for stability reasons. Sadly, the latter can't be done with MTRRLFBE as that utility doesn't allow setting two different MTRRs starting from the same physical memory address.
As for QDOS, performance on the Voodoo2 can be improved by using FX_GLIDE_ALLOC_COLOR environment variable to enable triple buffering if vsync is used. Here is a batch file example:
1@ECHO OFF 2SET FX_GLIDE_ALLOC_COLOR=3 3QDOS.EXE 4SET FX_GLIDE_ALLOC_COLOR=
Multitexturing gives better performance too, but depending on the texture format used in those third-party drivers, it can cause significant slowdowns.
Edit: The correct environment variable is FX_GLIDE_ALLOC_COLOR, not SSTV2_ALLOC_COLOR. 😜
You have to copy two files from the opengl and voodoo folders to get your voodoo2 working, then launch qdos.exe with the -mtex command line argument to enable the multitexturing capability of your voodoo2.
