NeoG_ wrote on 2026-06-15, 12:53:

Necrodude wrote on 2026-06-15, 12:46:

I can post a onedrive link to my #Quake2ToTheMax patch.
It contains all tweaks and patches we managed to get when we hosted the #Quake2ToTheMax tweaking contest

With the Q2 and Q3 to #tothemax patches, can they be configured to run the game as originally intended without modifying sounds/textures/animations etc? But still using the re-compiled optimisations

Yes.
The patches have three parts.
Recompiled faster binarys with added features and improvements.

Config files that gives fps improvements

Pak files with lowres textures and low res sounds

Here is the onedrive link

https://1drv.ms/f/c/b8c79c7b63196774/IgDimMGk … gSYeo8?e=R5nqt4

This patch is a work in progress. It is not done yet.

Installation.
First of all, you need to have your Quake2 game patched to the 3.20 version.
If not. DO it!

When your game has the 3.20 patch do the following:
Copy all files in this folder/subfolder and place them in your Quake2 folder.
Overwrite all files.

You will now get the 3.28 patch.
This patch binaries speeds upp the game and adds a lot of improvements to the game.
See the 3.28 patch notes

You will also get 3 new pak files (you will find them in the baseq2 folder).

pak3 - This is a part of the 3.28 patch. It is not optional
pak6 - This pak file has low quality textures. Can speed up the game a lot on a slow 4mb gpu like the Riva 128. This pak file is optional
pak7 - This pak file has 4khz mono sounds. Can give a slight boost to the games performance on a really slow computer. This pak file is also optional.

You will also find a optional config file.
autoexec.cfg
This file will load the game with the fastest settings that I managed to put together.
When the game starts the game will first load the autoexec.cfg. All settings from the autoexec.cfg will be saved in your config.cfg . This file also lies in the baseq2 folder.
If the games by some reason refuses to start with this config file. Just place the files somewhere else and then delete your config.cfg file.
The next time you start the game, the game will revert to the default settings and create a new config.cfg file.

All these files together raised the FPS on my 233 pentium MMX with a riva 128 from 11 to 32 frames per second.
The texture and the sound pak files will probably only give a slight marginal FPS boost on a fast K6-3+ machine.
I got nice improvements with these files on much slower Pentium MMX machines with 32mb of ram. This probably due to the small file size.

Forgot to mention there is a Quake2.bat file. When using this file a program called Cachem.exe purges your ram memory and pushes most stuff from the ram to your swap space. This making more ram available to Quake2

Edit: the 3.28 patch is great. It is faster then the original Quake2.exe. It adds a lot of nice features. However AMD:s 3dnow patch is still faster on K6-2/k6-3 systems.

Quake 2 BDGN 3.28 patch notes.

Cinematic can now be turned off in the option menu so the intro and
movies between missions don play.
It can also be disable from the console using cl_hack_nocinematics 1.

Hiding or drawing the weapon on the left can now be done from the
option menu, no need to go to multiplayer and player setup menu.

There are now 4 sound quality options instead of two.
8khz was added for slower machines and 44kHz for faster machines.
The game only has 22khz sound originally so a high definition
sound pack needs to be added to benefit from 44kHz.

Wall and floor textures can also be disable in OpenGL mode from the
video menu, mainly for very slow machines.
The console can also be used to disable textures, gl_hack_notextures 1.
There is also gl_hack_noimages 1 to turn off even more textures but
the result is ugly.

Zoom was added to the game.
Its 2.4x and is bound to mouse2 but can be rebound to any key in the
option menu and customize controls.
Sensitivity is adjusted automatically when zoom is used.

If you desire custom zoom and sensitivity you can set zfov and
zsensitivity manually in the console.
You should also set dfov and dsensitivity to match your normal
fov and sensitivity cvars.
*(z for zoom and d for default when not zoomed)

All keybindings where updated to modern WASD hack style and more
keybindings are available in the option menu under customize controls,
like weapons, zoom and grenade.

Freelook is now on by default and a lot of legacy keybindings and mouse
settings where removed.

Chris Dohnal SMP patch for Quake 3 was added to the video menu as a
driver option, SMP OpenGL.
Only OpenGL is available as a menu option because the 3dfx
implementation was intended to use 3dfxvgl.dll from the 30202 voodoo2
drivers and using that or other minigl driver offered no benefit in any
testing we did.

Using the SMP Opengl driver option in the video menu I saw a gain
from around 160fps to 220fps on my Dual Athlon MP 2Ghz with the patch.
On my Dual Pentium 3 1Ghz I saw no gains, so results may very so make
sure to benchmark before and after using timedemo 1 and demo1.dm2
in the console.
Also Make sure you actually have 2 or more processors and are running
windows NT, this is not for single processor systems with windows 9x,
it will crash but the game should launch just fine again.
Processors with SMT like Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading should work as
long as you are on some Version of Windows NT.
The patch should be mostly useful if you are CPU limited and not GPU limited.

Thanks!

Update on my system... bought a PCI networking card to make life a little easier, but it was giving all sorts of trouble. After a bunch of messing with jumpers, my conclusion is it does NOT like 83 mhz FSB.

Dropped it down to 66 and the card worked fine and while I was at it, did some more benchmarks...

(Note I was getting about 53 fps with 83 fsb x 4.5)

Stock Quake2
66 fsb / 6x mult = 36 fps
75 fsb / 6x mult = 44 fps

Clearly the bus and old chipset are the limiting factor here. I need to get a proper super socket 7