robertmo wrote on 2020-03-13, 15:54:

-display sdl

Thanks, its greatly improved my experience.

I have read through this topic and I quite agree with many of the posts.

While a lot of us like those noisy big old retrocomputers you have to face it there is an increasing demand from the retro community and literally no supply for parts so sooner or later you will not be able to get a 6600 or a Voodoo 1/2/3. There is not enough demand to have 3DFX reopen again 😀 These 20-30 year old components going to die sooner or later and next to recapping them or reflowing them in the oven and hoping it will work there is not much more you can do at home.

I was also entertained by the thought of using KVMs PCI passthrough but for different setup to build some crazy 64 core ryzen with RTX30xx to be my main Linux workstation and run Win7 or 10 with PCI passthrough for gaming so I have a gaming+working computer in one. The only reason I use microsoft's OSes is just for gaming. I never particularly liked wine on linux because maybe 1-2 games work millions of others are broken so I dedicate like 1 hour per year trying out the latest wine release but don't have high hopes.

I think what we need is not really a passthrough but to have actual work on the 3D acceleration and OpenGL drivers for VMs. I mean an RTX3080 is more than equipped to do the work of a Voodoo3 or 6600 even with some sort of translation... For example here is 1 of my retro Vmware machines:

This runs any 2D retro games from the 99 era fine like Sc1, Diablo but of course there is no 3D acceleration. I have a similar Vmware VM with DOS/WFW311 and that's also so-so good (small issues with vmwares SB16 emulation sometimes). I was reading through the Vmware forum what happened with this 3D because I recalled them having it in some of their workstation products and they removed it because it was buggy, too hard, unfixable whatever. Seems like they gave up with it.

Gopher666 wrote on 2021-02-13, 11:51:

I was also entertained by the thought of using KVMs PCI passthrough but for different setup to build some crazy 64 core ryzen with RTX30xx to be my main Linux workstation and run Win7 or 10 with PCI passthrough for gaming so I have a gaming+working computer in one. The only reason I use microsoft's OSes is just for gaming. I never particularly liked wine on linux because maybe 1-2 games work millions of others are broken so I dedicate like 1 hour per year trying out the latest wine release but don't have high hopes.

Slightly off-topic: with the advent of the Valve-backed Proton project, running most Windows games on Linux has become a convenient and often native-like experience. You can check https://www.protondb.com to get an idea of how well most games work with this. The easiest and most convenient way to use Proton is by using it inside Steam. there is a checkmark you can enable in the Steam settings that forces all Windows games (not just the ones currently officially supported) to be runnable on Linux using Proton. And in my experience so far, most of them work out of the box, as if they were native Linux games.

Beside Steam inbuild Wine support, there is free PlayOnLinux Wine frontend its not working for everything, but i would say that for half of things it does work. There is also Crossover frontend from Wine main company as commercial product is not expensive.

While a lot of us like those noisy big old retrocomputers you have to face it there is an increasing demand from the retro community and literally no supply for parts so sooner or later you will not be able to get a 6600 or a Voodoo 1/2/3. There is not enough demand to have 3DFX reopen again 😀 These 20-30 year old components going to die sooner or later and next to recapping them or reflowing them in the oven and hoping it will work there is not much more you can do at home.

I dont believe in big demand by gamers.. look at KJLiew Qemu 3dfx channel he has whole 10 subscribers.. problem are probably hoarders and "collectors" (which see these as investments as old cars etc) which are not really using their cards and some retro resellers, which are making money from retro stuff. There was made more than enough cards back in the day, much more than community would need, even if we would expect that 90% of these cards ended in thrash or died.. Problem is that almost everyone who now find this card in basement is clever enough to check its price on eBay and sell it for similar price, or even when he would sell it for peanuts, its big chance some will just buy and resell it for "actual market" price.

I will raise this topic. In addition to VFIO, a lot of other solutions have appeared, including vgpu-unlock or open-mdev where there is more GPU virtualization (such as CPU virtualization through KVM, WHPX, HAXM and Google accelerator, i.e. sharing a graphics card so that many virtual machines could use it). The question is, can it somehow be used in retrogaming? I have a (maybe crazy) idea to virtualize the graphics card you have in your computer (it does not necessarily have Win9x drivers) and to replace its PCI ID in QEMU so that the graphics card you have (e.g. RTX 3090 or something similar) in a virtual machine in QEMU it identified itself as, for example, GeForce 4 MX 440, so it could be used in Win98 (or in XP). Anyone tried to do something like this? Seems feasible, but is it really?

MrPepka wrote on 2022-09-04, 22:12:

I will raise this topic. In addition to VFIO, a lot of other solutions have appeared, including vgpu-unlock or open-mdev where there is more GPU virtualization (such as CPU virtualization through KVM, WHPX, HAXM and Google accelerator, i.e. sharing a graphics card so that many virtual machines could use it). The question is, can it somehow be used in retrogaming? I have a (maybe crazy) idea to virtualize the graphics card you have in your computer (it does not necessarily have Win9x drivers) and to replace its PCI ID in QEMU so that the graphics card you have (e.g. RTX 3090 or something similar) in a virtual machine in QEMU it identified itself as, for example, GeForce 4 MX 440, so it could be used in Win98 (or in XP). Anyone tried to do something like this? Seems feasible, but is it really?

A few years ago I tried using AMD Sky series with SR-IOV and mxGPU under Qemu on Debian. With many approaches and up to three installed I eventually gave up fighting a moving target. I used dynamic allocation until that broke. The gpu's have very wide compatibility so I split them up and now one is in my 5520 dual overkill XP box. Generally every incarnation was excellent up to a point and never hit the magic 100% all in one box.