EdmondDantes wrote:

So, […]
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So,

A week ago I downloaded some demos of the original Tomb Raider. One of these was supposed to be a 3Dfx version, but it was a DOS executable, which blew my mind as I had never heard of a hardware-accelerated DOS game before. But when I tried to run it, my screen would always go blank and my computer would freeze.

My specs, by the way:

Windows 98SE
700mhz AMD processor (I forget which model)
SB16 Sound Card (ISA slot)
Voodoo 3 2000 (PCI slot)

I've tested this in both Dos and Windows and even in Dosbox... the latter gives me a message saying no PCI Bus Detected, but it doesn't blank the screen or crash the computer like the other two modes do.

So I figured this was just the Demo's problem and maybe the full game doesn't have this issue, but... it does. More specifically, to enable 3Dfx you have to copy the tomb.exe from the "3DPatch" directory on the CD, and there's one directory for 3Dfx and another for Voodoo Rush (plus three others I didn't look at). I tried the 3Dfx one, but I got precisely the same result that the demo always gave me. At that point I was reluctant to try anymore because I was afraid all this crashing and restarting might be harming my computer.

So I ask you this, with my system is it at all possible to play Tomb Raider with 3D acceleration, or should I just be happy with the (still-awesome-looking) high resolution software render?

Try the Voodoo Rush patch instead, I think you will have a much better experience. Read more about it here : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/07/t … kool-style.html

Yup there are two different 3dfx patches 😀

Statically linked glide games freeze/not find the card with Voodoo3/4/5.
The reason is simple. These games use the very old glideAPI version. And of course this version not know anything about Voodoo3 and later. Even the Voodoo2s detection fails on fast PCs by the way.
Theoretically these games can be debugged and the initialization code can be fixed.
Practically - some games have versions w/o the static link (Descent II, Tomb Raider, Screamer 2, XCar: Experimental Racing).
Others (Actua Soccer(?)/VR Soccer '96, Battle Arena Toshinden, EF2000: Tactcom, Fatal Racing/Whiplash, Starfighter 3000) still wait patching. But these games can be used with DOSBox.

P.S. There are some compatibility problems even for "glide2x.ovl" games. One example is Archimedean Dynasty.

EdmondDantes wrote:

A week ago I downloaded some demos of the original Tomb Raider. One of these was supposed to be a 3Dfx version, but it was a DOS executable, which blew my mind as I had never heard of a hardware-accelerated DOS game before. But when I tried to run it, my screen would always go blank and my computer would freeze.

There are hardware-accelerated DOS ports for several of the proprietary 3D-APIs.
See 3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D) (It is only mentioned for some of the APIs if the ports are for DOS or for Windows.)
None (or close to none) for ATI CIF, none for PowerSGL except Tomb Raider 1, quite a few for 3dfx Glide. (Glide is so common it is not listed in the above thread.)

Okay, so here's the results.

Going with people's suggestions, I tried the Voodoo Rush patch/executable.

I also found reports that the 3dfx executable for Unfinished Business works fine for the expansion, so I set up to test that.

I read at places that you need to have the file glide2x.ovl in the game's directory and the Windows/System directory. I had that ovl but it was in C:\Windows, so I copied that version to the two other directories.

So, first I tried playing in a pure DOS mode. The game ran fine... until I opened the inventory, then it would hang.

HOWEVER, when I tried playing it in Windows, suddenly the game worked near-perfectly. The only thing's I've noticed now are that for some reason a white outline sometimes appears around Lara's guns and sometimes (rarely) I can see "seams" or the level geometry. The latter is rare, and the former doesn't bother me, in fact somehow it seems natural.

I also have noticed the game's sound seems biased towards the left, but that may be something to do with my soundcard or my speakers and not the game itself, so I'll have to investigate (oddly, it seems like around the time I installed the demos--which I also played TR2's demo--all my sound settings DID get changed so everything was left-speaker-aligned. Fixing that helped this issue somewhat but TR still seems to have a slight bias. Maybe Lara is a lefty?)

But those are different issues, and honestly don't even bother me that much since this isn't the kind of game where you need to know where a sound is coming from, so for the moment I'm considering this case SOLVED.

Then I'm going to go miss a mile-wide leap, get Lara impaled on spikes, then be glad that this version lets you save anywhere. ^__^

Yea the sound is like that.

EdmondDantes wrote:

HOWEVER, when I tried playing it in Windows, suddenly the game worked near-perfectly. The only thing's I've noticed now are that for some reason a white outline sometimes appears around Lara's guns and sometimes (rarely) I can see "seams" or the level geometry. The latter is rare, and the former doesn't bother me, in fact somehow it seems natural.

Disabling the anti-aliasing with F3 will remove the white outlines. Disabling the mipmapping will help hide the seams. Otherwise, glad it works for you.

You're welcome.

One last thing, is it possible to adjust the brightness? A lot of areas seem way too dark... there was one hole I was supposed to jump down to avoid a rock, but I didn't because (in Glide mode) it looked like just a hole of blackness (in software tho I can clearly see the bottom). I tried going to 3dfx tools and messing with the Glide/OpenGL settings but that literlly does nothing, and I can't seem to find an in-game brightness/gamma adjust.

Voodoo is controlled in DOS by environment variables. Dunno about the Voodoo3 prefix but Voodoo2 uses SSTV2_GAMMA, SSTV2_BGAMMA, SSTV2_GGAMMA and SSTV2_RGAMMA for this.