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3dfx Voodoo Graphic Card Emulation Coming To DOSBox
KingofGnG writes with this excerpt from King Arthur's Den: "One of the forthcoming versions of the best PC-with-DOS emulator out there should include a very important architectural novelty, ie the software implementation of the historical Voodoo Graphics chipset created by 3dfx Interactive in the Nineties. "Kekko", the programmer working on the project with the aid of the DOSBox crew and the coding-capable VOGONS users, says that his aim is the complete and faithful emulation of SST-1, the first Voodoo chipset marketed in 1996 inside the first 3D graphics accelerated cards on the PC."
Gotta give the DOSBox guys credit, they make the best even better! I can't wait until Good Old Games have Voodoo built in to their custom DOSBox game installers! Instant Voodoo, whoo!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It seems strange to hear something that happened in my life time referred to as historical. I remember when julius ceasar and socrates first built the prototype of the TNT2 graphics card
I be able to replay the original Unreal, on an emulation of the hardware I had at the time, (actually think I had a Voodoo 2 not a 1).
Hopefully that means I'll finally be able to play it on a 64-bit OS...
So this seems to be very different from something like, say, GliDos.
As per TFA, the Voodoo emulator is basically lifted from MAME. Granted, integrating it into DOSBox is important work and all, but I would judge the original code to be worth more than 90% of the effort. Yet Aaron gets no credit in the summary.
So how long till the new version is in the Debian stable repositories for Lenny?
I've got a bunch of old PC Gamer magazines from back when they were about 200 pages, and they are filled with voodoo reviews and ads. Those were fun, interesting times in the PC gaming world, when there was a lot of money for slick ad campaigns and large-format zines. Those were the days...
I've played the 3Dfx version of Tomb Raider in a custom version of DOSBox by Gulikoza that emulates the Glide API. It works very well and is less clunky than using Glidos. I'd rather that was supported within the official DOSBox, or the Matrox Millennium's graphics for the even better looking version of Tomb Raider was supported.
http://www.si-gamer.net/gulikoza/
Built in IPX support too! It's just the best program I downloaded in last few years.
OH BOY! Mechwarrior 2 here I come!
http://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/3dfx/prodotti/voodoo56000/ on day too :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I remember vquake came out before glquake, since this was the first real 3D game going, I would like to see the rendition rredline support next to the glide.
On a side note, I miss my Verite V1000 (a handout from a rich friend who had his parents get him a Voodoo).
Real, honest to god commercial spam?
On Slashdot?
Just because Anonymous is in the news doesn't mean they're that busy.
This one case where spam can cost more than it earns...
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
Actually I think Stiletto is (was?) the main developer of the MAME Voodoo emulation.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Actually I think Stiletto is (was?) the main developer of the MAME Voodoo emulation.
No, you're wrong. Stiletto doesn't do programming.
Does this mean I get to relive playing quakegl on my Voodoo for the first time? Sweet, I'll finally own you LPBs.
Wow, reminds me of my first 3d accelerated experiance on a 3DFX Voodoo 2 playing Quake 2. There were a few great classic games that ran only on that board, and a few that ran best on it. Motorhead and Turok are all that can spring to the mind at the moment though. The users of wine found a way to play these games though with a Glide to OpenGL wrapper, so I was able to play turok again without the need of a voodoo card in linux. Great job to the dosbox team for making this available for all to use though. I look forward to being able to play some of those classic games in both windows and linux again.
geez! the voodoo3/3000 still runs under my desk!
where's the PowerVR PCX-1/PCX-2 emulation?
... I'd rather see them integrate MIDI support. Particularly nice would be MT-32 emulation, but any half-decent MIDI would do. At the moment you have to pipe MIDI commands through to the system's synthesizer, and not all DOSBox-capable systems have a synth that's very good, or easy to setup, or even any synth at all. Unfortunately, DOSBox aren't doing this at the moment as a matter of policy.
I encourage anyone who'd also like this to mention it to the DOSBox devs.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
you will find out that you can run Windows 95 in dosbox with some tweaks.
But then how are GOG and the like supposed to distribute copies of games that ran in Windows 95, as suggested in this comment? Microsoft no longer makes available the "boot disk" and "setup files" referenced on your tutorial, and even if it did, they'd be too expensive. FreeDOS is a feature-complete Free clone of MS-DOS, but the Free clone of Windows is nowhere near that level simply because Windows itself is so big.
I'd rather see them integrate MIDI support. Particularly nice would be MT-32 emulation [but] DOSBox aren't doing this at the moment as a matter of policy.
I imagine that the copyright in Roland's samples is licensed under terms that preclude free redistribution. Can you provide a high-quality sound font with a fully paid-up license?
But even more technically, they tended to act as graphics decelerators, so I guess I'll give the Voodoo a pass. It really was a game changer.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
At least we won't need to daisy chain the card with the graphics card, like you did with the original Voodoo Graphics PCI. Never did work properly on my system, I ended up just unplugging the monitor and plugging it directly in to the Voodoo when I was using it.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Way back when I had a Voodoo II, the only thing I ever wanted was a second card to do SLI. Alas, by the time I could actually afford it, it was more cost effective to fork out for a whole new graphics card (I actually got a Matrox G400Max -- Dualhead ftw!).
If only I could run two copies of DosBox to somehow get SLI. I could finally achieve my old dream!
Somehow, I originally misread the title as "3dfx Voodoo Graphic Card Emulation Coming To DDoSBox". My thought was "Damn, those hackers will stop at nothing to shut down Amazon and eBay."
I thought the only reason to use XNA was to make your game portable to Xbox 360, because XNA blocks off several features (such as audio synthesis, fictional languages in-game, and easy portability of the back-end to or from unmanaged platforms) that are otherwise available to unmanaged PC game development. What other advantage of XNA am I missing?
Memories :)
The S3 ViRGE was the "decelerator" of its time. Had they been used as glorified software renderers expected to do little besides push point-sampled, perspective corrected textures onto polygons, with all geometry calculations handled by the host CPU, they would have been better, but the competition was too steep for anyone to bother writing what would amount to an enhanced software renderer. Visual quality would have been shown up badly using such a scheme, so the native titles for the ViRGE were pretty but terribly slow. From what I recall the Descent II port was a pretty heroic effort.
The Rendition cards were really very solid by comparison, but the V1000 series took a noticeable speed hit when they were expected to handle on-chip z-buffering. Their fillrate was also around half that of the Voodoo1, but they would still have been price-competitive if RAM prices hadn't fallen through the floor and made the Voodoo Graphics board realistically obtainable.
In the 90's, the two expensive peripheral cards I bought were, respectively, a 3DFX Voodoo video card, right before they went out of business, and a GadgetLabs Wave 4/24 sound card, right before *they* went out of business. Cutting edge fail!
I'm confused, but confess I havent used DOSBox in years.
The 3dfx cards were for windows only, they didnt have DOS drivers.
What am I missing here?
Now 3DFX emulation in Virtualbox running Win98 would be cool...
Happy days, eh? I'd forgotten about the S3, the way you forgot about those things that Uncle Barney did to you that one Christmas.
Best memory is Microsoft's EMEA D3D Evangelist (that was his actual job title) refusing to look at us showing the same demo running at twice the frame rate on a Voodoo using glide than using D3DIM. I mean, he literally wouldn't turn his eyes towards the screen, he just kept banging on about how D3DIM was inherently superior to the native API of the hardware, so we must be mistaken about what we were seeing.
Still, I guess he did have the last laugh, but back in The Day, D3DIM was a pig, and D3DRM was a rabid, aroused pig that had you pinned down over a barrel. Good times.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The 3DFX stuff was not the first hardware accelerated 3D on the PC. In fact there were a bunch of extremely expensive high-end OpenGL cards and Matrox had a consumer priced card with hardware 3D. There may have been others. I'm not sure who did the first PC OpenGL card, 3DLabs or Intergraph or somebody like that around 1993/1994. The Matrox stuff never took off just like practically everything else they have done. Matrox has a long history of creating technology ahead of its time and making all sorts of mistakes that prevent it from being popular (not unlike Xerox, Philips, et al).
3DFX is the first one that got popular though. Mostly because there were relatively cheap and had a nice API and open development model for game developers.
It was the 1st 32-bit "freeware" I had written that did pretty well, right into publication too, for gamers.
APK 3dFx Tuning Engine 2002++ SR-2000
http://imagenes.sftcdn.net/es/scrn/5000/5384/3_APK3DF.jpg
I was fortunate enough to have it do well, and I loved 3dFx's videocards too (1st ones I ever tried for a PC, that did OpenGL gaming (IDSoftware's work was my fav. then, and still are to this very day in fact)).
APK
P.S.=> So, again, per my subject-line above & as you stated? Ahhh... "memories"! It "blows me away" that it's STILL out there for download to this very day in fact & in places/spots/sites online I had NO idea... apk
Since GoG packages some of their games by wrapping them up in an optimally-configured DOS emulator, this is actually quite exciting for their customers, in terms of future potential.
That legacy lives on in every single graphics chip developed by Intel after the i740.
Would it then be possible to install Windows 95 into dosbox and run Thief and Thief 2?
Even in the original article "Kekko" is getting too much credit.
Aaron Giles (www.aarongiles.com) wrote the entire Voodoo emulation for MAME (www.mamedev.org), and now DOSBox simply includes this code.
All Kekko did was make a few trivial changes to the source to hook up the existing code.
Credit where credit is due, folks.
Theif and Thief 2 will run on XP at least. 2 summers ago I played through 1-3 On my laptop.
However some notes:
* For Nvidia Cards: You'll have to find the hacked binaries for theif 1 to get it run. Something about a bug with reported texture memory I think. Theif 2, I believe had a config setting for it.
* For Multi Core CPUs (or multiple CPUs, or hyper threads), 1-2 (I can remember about 3) rely on low-level cpu values for timing loops. If it switches CPUs at the wrong time, the game freeze. You'll need a utility to set the CPU affinity or set it from the task manager so that the proc runs on exactly 1 CPU (any one but only one).
* EAX works fine if you have a sound that supports it.
Graphics, yeah, whatever.
I've got two of these sound cards that would've cost an obscene amount of money 12 years ago. The last fully functional drivers for them were for Win98, so their previous owners just tossed them in the trash and I picked them up for free.
Nowadays Creative, the litigious bastards that killed Aureal off, sells cards twice as expensive, half as capable, and with worse drivers than the average winmodem.
S3 had nothing to do with it. Intel bought Real3D, took the entirely competent architecture of the Starfighter, and pulled a stupid trick by forcing it to fetch out to AGP memory for texture storage, leaving the user with a large framebuffer and excruciatingly slow texture swapping over the bus. PCI versions of the card obviously couldn't do this, and were frequently better performers because this was properly compensated for in the drivers.
Subsequent integrated video chips continued along this shambling path, occasionally receiving updates - multitexturing here, S3TC support there, before receiving a minor overhaul somewhere around the i865G, which was allegedly DirectX 7-capable, but too slow to take advantage of most of that featureset. The i915 through GMA 3100 were native DirectX 9 parts, but pokey and prone to driver glitches; the x3100* onward are different DirectX 10+ parts, and then there's Sandy Bridge's integrated video which finally might not cause whimpering pain to all who behold it in operation. I'm STILL not confident in its OpenGL driver for anything besides desktop compositing.
* Yes, there's a huge friggin' gap between the 3100 and x3100, to the point that you could argue they aren't the same chip in any meaningful way. Alarmingly, this is actually less confusing than the naming schemes for their CPUs now...
According to the Aaron's Log, he is the one who made the 3dfx Voodoo emulator. (scroll down the page till November 2003) http://www.aarongiles.com/mamelog.html
To fully expience the suck of the s3 virge run quake on it.................
fastest card evar to the parts bin
Does anyone know any other planned features of the upcoming version? Why are DOSBox' upcoming versions always such a secret?
I may be completely wrong here but I don't think there actually were more than a handful of DOS games using Glide: Blood, Carmageddon, Descent 2, Mechwarriors 2, Screamer 2, Shadow Warrior and Tomb Raider come to mind, plus maybe a few more obscure ones. I'm not trying to belittle the developers' efforts but I think what most gamers interested in re-playing the majority of their old favourites are really looking for are Glide Wrappers. These emulate Voodoo cards in Windows using Direct X or OpenGL. Some of these haven't been developed in years or will ever see their final version, but I remember playing Unreal on WinXP from end to end in all its 3dfx glory fairly recently using Zeckensack's wrapper with just a few visual glitches.
I remember playing Tomb Raider accelerated on my 4 Meg S3 Virge and it was better than the PSX version (at the time a PSX was $300 and the Virge was $50).
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