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...
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.
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.
It's possible that they could secure a license to it from Microsoft. A stripped-down version of Windows 95 that didn't include any of the apps and could just run one program full screen (no printing subsystem, no explorer, no drivers for anything other than the specific DOSBox config, and so on) would be pretty small. Given that MS isn't currently selling Windows 95, they might be willing to sell it again.
On the other hand, WINE has pretty good support for Windows 9x APIs now. It might be possible for DOSBox to provide a minimal win32 layer using some of that code.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News