What is the trick to get Unreal working with the S3TC Textures on savage4?
I tested lot's of drivers and different Unreal Versions, nothing worked.

Some thing's I came across:
- The S3-Drivers that do not offer an installer sometimes lack the vgart.vxd so they cannot be installed. (you can copy the file from another driver)
- Some "Win9x" drivers require Win98. If you install them on Win95 you will get a vxd-exception right at the restart of win95
- Copying the (latest) "metal.dll" to the game directory is useless, it always uses the metal.dll in "windows/system".
- The latest metal.dll "2.0.3" seems to break metal with the win95-drivers. Unreal looks like "software-rendering" with these but UT99 does seem to care.

I managed to get UT99 working correct with a driver package from 1999. These drivers seem to be best on win95. Now I will test Win3x/OS2/Linux/Amithlon...

More to come...

...but still no "unreal" working with S3TC... because UT99 is working correct I thing the "unreal-engine-version" is the key here. S2MeTal seems to be on 2.2.4v upwards...but 2.2.4...2.2.6 does not change anything.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2024-12-09, 08:36:

What is the trick to get Unreal working with the S3TC Textures on savage4?
I tested lot's of drivers and different Unreal Versions, nothing worked.

I got S3 Metal to work on Unreal Gold using these steps. That was under Win98 though, and I was using the A-Trend driver CD from Phil's Website.

As for compressed textures, I think you only get those on the special levels from the S3 Savage3D Unreal Gallery download pack. Here's a video showcasing that.

Hi, no it's not about those "extra demo showcase" textures, it's about using the s3tc textures from the UT99 2n CD with unreal on Win95 in S3-Metal mode.

unreal-gold still has the original textures...they offer a higher-quality mode, but they are far lower than those from the UT99 2nd. CD. The S3TC Textures from UT99 do work if they are converted to "unreal-format" with later gfx-cards like GF3, but they do not on my savag4 in S3-MeTal renderer. Perhaps they never did ?

Games with S3 MeTal: […]
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Games with S3 MeTal:

Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island - From release (VGA Capture)
Deus Ex - From release (1)
Dr. Brain: Action Reaction - From release (VGA Capture)
Nerf Arena Blast - From release (VGA Capture)
Rune + Halls of Valhalla (Add On) - From Release
Rune GOLD (= Rune + Halls of Valhalla) - From release (1)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Fallen - From Release (1)
Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror - From Release (VGA Capture)
The Nameless Mod - Deus Ex Mod
The Wheel of Time - From Release (1)
Unreal + Return to Na Pali (Add On) - From release (VGA Capture)
Unreal GOLD (= Unreal + Return to Na Pali) - From release (1) (s3tc textures)
Unreal Tournament - From release (1) (s3tc textures)

I have a Savage 4 Pro, would that be enough for the above games or should I go with the Savage 2000? If yes, would anyone be able to confirm if Savage 2000 has compatibility issues with any of the MeTal games?

dr.zeissler wrote on 2024-11-29, 07:26:

What Linux has builtin S3 Savage4 support, to bad the explenation never talks about in what kernel or what distribution it's supported/included.
https://linux.die.net/man/4/savage

That's the manpage for the xorg driver, so any Linux distribution that still ships with xorg should support it.
xorg only provides 2D acceleration, nothing fancy. It's also on its way out, since most modern distributions have already switched to Wayland.

3D acceleration was supported until Mesa 7.11.2, but this is probably not shipped with any modern Linux distribution anymore.
Last I checked, AOSC OS/Retro was explicitely including it.

Edit: ArchLinux still have those old Mesa drivers, too (of course they do 😜).