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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."
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.
My friend has just released a rebuild of carmageddon using XNA, check it out at http://blog.1amstudios.com/
Well if you look around on the vogons dosbox forums: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/index.php?c=7 , you will find out that you can run Windows 95 in dosbox with some tweaks. In fact, they are using the real voodoo drivers installed in windows 95 for testing the voodoo emulation in dosbox.
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.
If you're talking about my Glide patch for DOSBox then I'll have to correct a few things :) :)).
First, the patch is fully crossplatform (at least the dosbox part), but you require Glide support (real card or wrapper) on the host system. Patches have been submitted to OpenGlide that make it work in Linux and OS X. The full setup (DOSBox + OpenGlide) has been tested to work on Windows, Linux and OS X including using Glide (and OpenGL through the 3dfx minidriver) in guest Windows9x (yes, I've played Half-Life inside Dosbox, fully accelerated
Kekko's patch obviously offers true 3Dfx emulation and also works with games that cannot be emulated with a wrapper. But at the moment only has (single threaded) software rendering which is great for testing but unfortunately little use for playing the games.