kjliew wrote:

RaVeN-05 wrote:

I tried Oracle VirtualBox with Windows 98 for: Chasm The Rift 640x480 (seems no slowdown) Blood 1280x1024 (seems no slowdowns) […]
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I tried Oracle VirtualBox with Windows 98 for:
Chasm The Rift 640x480 (seems no slowdown)
Blood 1280x1024 (seems no slowdowns)
Quake 1280x1024 with d_mipscale 0 and d_mipcap 0 (oh wow again very stable fast fps)

I guess you played those games with software rendering. Pyl software rendering works very well with accelerated QEMU, too, so I think the same would apply for VirtualBox. Any CPU less than 5 years old with over 3GHz should be able to run any legacy games with native software rendering at full speed. Even Unreal 1 software rendering can do over 30fps at 640x480 in accelerated QEMU.

I know on Vmware you can enable dynarec by disabling VT-x so be aware when running benchmarks.

dgvoodoo2 together with qemu in haxm mode has a very nice performance 😉
Topic 60950
haxm gives over 4 times more fps
max detail and sound settings in a very complicated surrounding with a lot of steam and many non player characters on screen at the same time gives 10 fps on i5-3450

Can you Capture video ? VGA Capture or Camera . w/o fraps its slowdowns , interesting to see how it works and performance. If you can

you can just get the executable and check it yourself 😉

robertmo wrote:

dgvoodoo2 together with qemu in haxm mode has a very nice performance ;) Topic 60950 haxm gives over 4 times more fps max detail […]
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dgvoodoo2 together with qemu in haxm mode has a very nice performance 😉
Topic 60950
haxm gives over 4 times more fps
max detail and sound settings in a very complicated surrounding with a lot of steam and many non player characters on screen at the same time gives 10 fps on i5-3450

If I'm understanding your results correctly, QEMU with just dgVoodoo2 (no HAXM mode) in what sounds like Dust's most complex area only gives 2.5 fps?!

yes, but not just area but standing in a specially chosen place, looking at a special angle in the right moment. In other words I tried hard to get lowest fps possible 😉
Although you rather easily achieve 15 fps

Without hax it is somewhat different as the game just slows down below some fps so you cannot monitor low fps without hax precisely.

ok sorry, don't mind just don't have win10 and any qemu haxm etc knowleadges too complicated for me at moment, but i don't want bother anyone, so forget =)

it can be win7 or later
you use it this way:
qemu-system-i386.exe hddimagename -cdrom cdname.iso -fda floppyimage -soundhw sb16,adlib -accel hax -boot c
(or -cdrom e:) (or -boot a)
It is enough to use bootable hddimage with dos or win98 from virtualbox or virtualpc or vmware
so you do everything in virtualbox or virtualpc or vmware
and only the last thing is done in qemu
you start with the most basic setup and step by step add more

robertmo wrote:

dgvoodoo2 together with qemu in haxm mode has a very nice performance ;) Topic 60950 haxm gives over 4 times more fps max detail […]
Show full quote

dgvoodoo2 together with qemu in haxm mode has a very nice performance 😉
Topic 60950
haxm gives over 4 times more fps
max detail and sound settings in a very complicated surrounding with a lot of steam and many non player characters on screen at the same time gives 10 fps on i5-3450

Did you obtain the FPS stats from QEMU console or there is a way to let the game display an in-game FPS stats?
By the way, QEMU KVM on Linux would probably give an additional 1.5~2.0x performance if we had a compatible Glide wrapper on Linux. OpenGlide may work with reduced visual effects (no smoke, lights shine through walls etc.) if I can get fake LFB lock working with shared memory LFB mode to filter out AUX/DEPTH locks from OpenGlide. Gulikoza's DOSBox Glide pass-through implementation support this and it is the default behavior from dosbox.conf.

Or perhaps, we can also start nagging Dege to port his dgVoodoo2 Glide wrappers into OpenGL 4.5 or Vulkan backend for Linux. 😀

BTW, what's your GPU? Apparently, you got better results than what I had, and dgVoodoo2 Glide wrapper likes beefy GPU with lots of shader cores.

660 Ti

i used:
qemu console,
fraps gives OSD fps,
MSI Afterburner - click detach button to reveal huge window with lots of stats - you can right click it to add/remove more
msi afterburner installs with rivatunerstatistics that have OSD fps if you turn on "show own statistics"

There is one thing to notice that when you are low on health so that the screen is blurred and shaky, then other apps show twice more fps than qemu console.

I don't know if the game has its own OSD with fps.

any way to count fps from dos ? dos 3dfx or win98?

Also somewhere exist wrapper so dgvoodoo can work, from dx11 to opengl or vullkan.

robertmo wrote:

660 Ti

That is a very nice hot-air blower of yours 😀 !

I found that by filtering out AUX/DEPTH buffer locks, dgVoodoo2 would gain a 2x improvement in FPS. The only visual artifact that I can observe is lights shines through the walls. Smokes effects are fine, even with OpenGlide, just in different colors. So this gives another insight if the game engine uses the read-back for additional chores on the CPU, or there are simply more pixels processing to be done when dgVoodoo2 sees an incoming AUX/DEPTH buffer lock. DgVoodoo2 seems to be extremely efficient in its LFB handling, this is evident by how fast it rendered the game menu and the opening briefing, probably only changed pixels are being processed. The game multiple LFB write locks within a frame has little performance impact for dgVoodoo2, but this will kill others such as OpenGlide and psVoodoo.

Can you please share your FPS stats from QEMU console for the following time and place:-
- Start of the game, looking down the tunnel and do not move the player. You need to wait for a few 5 second samples until the FPS stabilized into 1~2fps fluctuation.
- Open the 1st level, with player staying outside of the opened door, but facing the 2 smokes, orange and white, on the center. Again, you need to wait for FPS to stabilize.

So far, I can say this is the toughest 3Dfx Glide games I had come across, even accelerated QEMU is finding a hard time to keep up. I thought Titanium Mech2 Mercenaries is the worst, but this one is a true eye opener. Even Quake3 and Turok2, with Glide3x API, are doing better than this.

i tried Pyl on real hardware Pentium 2 350Mhz + Voodoo2 8mb seems not enough for better fps, does game designed that bad way?
i will try 2Ghz + Voodoo2, ill say later

tested on amd 2.2Ghz + voodoo2 Win98 Pyl has same fps drop problems =(
open areas seems 15 or 20 fps, while looking directly into walls 60+ fps

you can try lowering some graphical settings to check if it is not voodoo2 that is limiting or rise them to have even better looking graphics 😀

kjliew wrote:

Can you please share your FPS stats from QEMU console for the following time and place:-
- Start of the game, looking down the tunnel and do not move the player. You need to wait for a few 5 second samples until the FPS stabilized into 1~2fps fluctuation.
- Open the 1st level, with player staying outside of the opened door, but facing the 2 smokes, orange and white, on the center. Again, you need to wait for FPS to stabilize.

start:
90fps

back to closed door:
15fps with spiders and soldier
130 without spiders and no soldier

it looks the game tries to stick keep stable 15 and 30

when i lower graphical settings and turn off music the general rule with not too complicated room is:
1 creature (spider or soldier) - 45fps
2 creatures - 30fps
3 creatures and more 15fps

it looks it is generally creatures that takes most cpu usage

robertmo wrote:

start:
90fps

That's very impressive! I think your GPU also helps a lot for dgVoodoo2. I only get 1/3 of this, and that somehow correlate to the difference of my GPU and yours. My GT730 Kepler only has 1/3 of your shader cores.

robertmo wrote:

back to closed door:
15fps with spiders and soldier
130 without spiders and no soldier

I noticed the same, too. After taking out the 1st soldier and spiders and returned to the same place facing the 2 smokes at the same depth would have different FPS stats, again except for the 15fps scenario, I roughly achieved about 1/3 of your FPS stats. So when CPU is free, the shear GPU prowess would be profound. And, I didn't even have dgVoodoo2 rendered at 1024x768, that would further stress the GPU. The game does look very impressive at 1024x768, the texture details are very good.

Wow 😲 , it's unimaginable that virtualization is putting up an interesting situation that we now require the best modern day's CPU and GPU to play a 20 years old game in the past! Can someone even believe this??

I noticed my card was switching to some economical modes lowering fps drastically ...

start:
90fps

back to closed door:
45fps with spiders and soldier
190 without spiders and no soldier

tried lowering drawing distance trough menu , seems no effect on fps,
tried lower resolution seems no effect on too.

with sniper mode, when i have glass scope fps even drops more, even if i look on wall .

tried on Voodoo3 2000 + Pentium2 350Mhz seems everything the same.

ok ill try settings.

i see need hex editor. =)

P.S. did there is any way to start game without mouse? because i trying use Glidos also , but glidos is lost mouse focus, even if i go to console window that started by game it not work, surprise this method work for Lands Of Lore, the game is can't be played without mouse , but if you go from glide Server window to console window , mouse start working .

P.P.S Found may pyl swithes , some of them not work, or broken? by translating ? i use Russian.

PYL.EXE /HELP
or
PYL.EXE -HELP
give you some switches