CoolGamer wrote:Dege, which Dosbox build do you use when testing Dos Glide games? It might be the best for us to use the same build that you ar […]
Show full quote
Dege, which Dosbox build do you use when testing Dos Glide games? It might be the best for us to use the same build that you are using as a starting point for the Dos glide games we play.
Can dgVoodoo2 work with Dos Glide games that are running via NTVDM of 32bit Windows 7/8/10? I am asking because Stiletto mentioned that all NTVDM support was removed from dgVoodoo2. Since I have a 64bit Windows 7, I am unable to install NTVDM and test it.
On a separate note, there is a new opensource project named NTVDMx64 that was started by Vogons community member "leecher". It is a port of NTVDM to Windows 10 64bit. It is possible to run dos programs on Windows 10 64bit by using NTVDMx64. You can read about it below and test it if you want. Currently it needs to be compiled on a 32bit OS (such as Win XP), but pre-compiled binaries started to be available on the web as it got popular among the public (see last link).
NTVDM on windows 10 x64
https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64
http://www.columbia.edu/%7Eem36/ntvdmx64.html
Currently NTVDMx64 does not work on Windows 7 64bit OS, but that might soon change since the project is under rapid development. If dgVoodoo2 can take advantage of it to run Dos Glide games natively on Windows 10 (and hopefully Windows 7 in the future), that would be great.
OK, to make that all clear...
- dgVoodoo1 had its own Glide2x.ovl Glide driver for DOS games (with DOS/4GW extender) and was capable to work inside MS NTVDM (Win NT line) or in a Win98 VM (Virtual Machine, a MS Win98 kernel terminology for DOS instances, Win9x didn't have NTVDM). It wrapped the Glide library calls and forwarded them to a dgVoodoo component running under Win32. For Win98, it always had to be the dgVoodoo server (so Glide2x.ovl+dgVoodoo.vxd implemented an inter-VM communication through the OS kernel). For WinNT, it could be the server or the Glide2x.dll itself attached to the NTVDM process as a virtual device dll.
Starting with Windows Vista, MS ruined NTVDM: not only it was/is missing from 64bit Windows but even the 32 bit one has some infirmity. Because of security reasons, NTVDM could only read VDD's (virtual device dlls) only from system folders, unlike previous Windows versions. What is more, as of Vista, MS introduced a totally new display driver model (WDDM) which lacked the possibility of setting good old display modes available in DOS through BIOS (like pure full screen text mode, planed 16 color modes, and high resolution (>= 640x400) VESA modes). So, DOS games didn't work even in 32 bit NTVDM.
dgVoodoo1 had a VESA implementation too, so I was able to run TR1 inside a 32bit Vista NTVDM after all.
- dgVoodoo2 has no any DOS driver component. But it can be used inside DosBox through Gulikoza's patch which solves the DOS2Windows communication by having its on Glide2x.ovl compiled for DosBox.
NTVDMx64 is indeed an interesting project but I cannot see how it will solve the display driver problem. If an emulation layer is planned for that, then it doesn't run natively and so you're just implementing another DosBox. Also, according to the readme, DPMI also doesn't work in NTVDMx64, but that is required for DOS Glide. 😢
So, I'm not planning to write DOS components for dgVoodoo2. I use Ykhwong's DosBox build which contains Gulikoza's patch by default, and it works fine with dgVoodoo.