Glide was proprietary - afaik the only way of playing games in glide on non glide hardware is with emulation on modern computers

Just look into nGlide, DGVoodoo 1/2, and Zeckensack's Glide Wrapper. There are also some specific to games such as Sven's Glide Wrapper for Diablo 2.

You can run most of these on old and current machines. Some of them support cards back to DirectX 7-class. Ideally you want at least a DirectX 9-class card because programmable shaders are used to reproduce some Glide functions.

To give some perspective on performance, a GeForce 6 era card can run almost any Glide game extremely well, faster than a real 3Dfx card, and usually look better doing it. But of course the unique image properties of 3dfx's dithered 16-bit output carries some sentimental value. DGVoodoo1 can be run in 16-bit color depth and with a DirectX 9 or older card you will get to see dithered output. All the cards back then had different approaches to dithering 16-bit color depth though.

And Glidos, or DOSBOX with a Glide wrapper passthrough (the software emulation in DOSBOX has way higher overhead than using a wrapper to provide GPU assisted Glide emulation) - for DOS with Glide

swaaye wrote on Yesterday, 17:40:

Just look into nGlide, DGVoodoo 1/2, and Zeckensack's Glide Wrapper. There are also some specific to games such as Sven's Glide Wrapper for Diablo 2.

You can run most of these on old and current machines. Some of them support cards back to DirectX 7-class. Ideally you want at least a DirectX 9-class card because programmable shaders are used to reproduce some Glide functions.

To give some perspective on performance, a GeForce 6 era card can run almost any Glide game extremely well, faster than a real 3Dfx card, and usually look better doing it. But of course the unique image properties of 3dfx's dithered 16-bit output carries some sentimental value. DGVoodoo1 can be run in 16-bit color depth and with a DirectX 9 or older card you will get to see dithered output. All the cards back then had different approaches to dithering 16-bit color depth though.

^^This^^

Upgrade Win98 to directx 9.0c and use a glide wrapper.

I would say that between one of the three wrappers or so you should be able to get many of those Glide titles working...

Wrappers usually don't bite on the characteristic things 3dfx hardware did, like the two different dither tables (and the dither subtraction for one of them), the screen filter, the default boosted gamma, etc. That's what you'd usually miss out. PCem does emulate some of that if you want to take a peek at what you'll be getting into. It's usually what the unexplained 'Looks Better On 3dFx VooDoo' phenomena is about (besides paletted texture and table fog support that others are very sketchy on supporting then which glide wrappers already handle well). What's NOT emulated is the interference and the funny colorramp overflow bug...

tl;dr:

3dfx hardware is fuzzy, and bright vaseline
glide wrappers aren't fuzzy and bright vaseline