Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
MasterBlaster run Bartertown! Wait... wrong question.
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/
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.
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.
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.
MT-32 emulation is a tricky subject, partly because users need to have their own legitimate copies of the MT-32 ROM and also because it actually takes quite a bit of processing power to emulate one.
I just have a real MT-32 :) I love playing old Sierra games in DOSBox with the MT-32 hooked up; they all sound so much better.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
If you have a synth that's not very good, or you don't have a synth at all (Timidity springs to mind on Linux - think it's even got a Cygwin port) then why would you care about MIDI in a DOS game either?
First, you need a working sound setup in order to get audio.
Second, you need a working video setup in order to get images.
Third, it's not at all unreasonable to suggest you have a working MIDI synth setup in order to get MIDI sound. How more "pure" can you get in an open-source "emulator" that can't bundle copyrighted sound samples, etc. than by piping the MIDI direct and perfectly to your own system's synth through 20 years of emulated hardware?
Up until this year, I'd never owned a MIDI device. My Soundblaster did whatever it could do back in the day and otherwise I just had integrated sound ever since. I can't ever remember having to turn MIDI off because it was so hideous or refused by some application, or missing out on lots of music. Even today, all of my machines have a Microsoft synthesizer under Windows, or can work with Timidity under Linux, even if they have their own hardware synthesizers. I don't think I've ever had to do *anything* to play a MIDI file. It might not be the same quality but then what you're asking for is a modern-day, high-quality, software MIDI synthesizer that works on all sound cards. That's WAY outside the scope of DOSBox and the second one appears, DOSBox will be able to take immediate advantage of it (hint: It'll probably be a Timidity port). Thing is, nobody's really bothered to make one of those on Windows (at least not a popular / free one) because... well... why would you bother when you have Timidity and the Microsoft synthesizer?
That said, MIDI device quality varies - I now have a MIDI keyboard and so have been playing with various MIDI software and found that some of it actually doesn't like the Microsoft synthesizer (e.g. Piano Booster) but that's more about latency issues because it's extremely finicky about timing than anything else. The recommendation? Use a real synth or get a better software synth, or adjust a manual "delay" setting in the program. You can't expect DOSBox to pick up the slack just because it's vaguely related to gaming when no-one else really has a problem playing MIDI. That's like expecting DOSBox to run every app that Wine can, or to emulate some speech synthesizer hardware even if the DOSBox user doesn't own it. It's silly. It's also like expecting Linux to include it's own MIDI synthesiser.
You have pure MIDI data being thrown out of the program in an unaltered form. Use it. If your sound card is shit, doesn't have a decent synthesizer or otherwise can't handle that pure MIDI data in a way you like, then get a better sound card, or fix MIDI on your computer entirely. Plug in a MIDI device, or a USB sound card that *does* have a proper MIDI synth. You'll be hard pressed to find anything non-professional because, to 99.9% of people, a MIDI rendition is a MIDI rendition.
Besides that, there is no "definitive" rendition of a set of MIDI data. It's *always* depended on the exact synthesizer and sound fonts used. There is no one hardware to pick and say "that makes the right MIDI noise for this game", so emulation is a completely moving target anyway. If you had a Sound Galaxy NX Pro (great card!) you would get a different MIDI experience to a genuine SoundBlaster's. Plug that MIDI data out through the most expensive professional MIDI keyboard and it would sound totally different again.
MIDI is a steam of notes, instrument names and timings. That stream of notes and timings is passed, unaltered, to a device that can play them. DOSBox has done it's job. Everything else is a matter of turning those notes, names and timings into something approximating the sound produced by that instrument in real life playing at that frequency. It's an OS / sound system issue, not an application issue. If double-clicking a MIDI on a webpage sounds shit, then playing a DOSBox MIDI sound will sound shit to
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.
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...
Service Pack 3 was required, but DirectSound worked fine. I can't believe I remember that...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Shortly after I bought a P2 300 (overclocked to 450, ofc) and out of my group of friends I was untouchable at Q3 for a while.
Everyone else got the Celeron 300a's cos they overclocked with better heat dissapation.
I never got the right Celeron 366 to hit the magic 550MHz.
sniff
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
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...