Software 3dfx voodoo emulation for DOSBox

[PingSpike]

http://kingofgng.com/eng/2010/10/20/3dfx-voodoo-graphic-cards-emulation-coming-to-dosbox/

Pretty interesting. Do you have to (and can you) run windows 95 from within Dosbox? I don't really remember playing 3D accelerated games through Dos, although I think there was at least some kind of driver for Quake.

I've really had a desire for a faithful emulation of an older video card that ran on CPU for awhile now. Many older games, particularly early 16-bit color only titles have serious issues with newer cards. I know software is slower, but those games are older as well. I wonder if a 3+ghz CPU can put up the same numbers as an old voodoo card, I'd imagine there are still some architectural disadvantages on the CPU. I read a thread about this and I guess the plan is to make it possible to push the emulation to a different thread.

Would it be possible to build a driver/emulator that you could just install in XP/Windows 7 and make a software 3dfx card there as well? I'd really like something like that to fix compatibility issues.

 

[Martimus]

Windows 95 used Dos 6.3 as a base, I believe. So technically running a game on Win95 is the same as running it on DOS.

I know I played Quake in DOS. I didn't have a Voodoo card though, just a Tseng Labs ET6000.

 

[WT]

Makes me wanna admire my Voodoo2 12mb card when I get home tonight. I also have a Canopus Voodoo1 6mb card and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card too. Don't ask me why ... *shrug*

 

[Bateluer]

Makes me wanna admire my Voodoo2 12mb card when I get home tonight. I also have a Canopus Voodoo1 6mb card and a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card too. Don't ask me why ... *shrug*

Nostalgia?

 

[erikistired]

carmageddon! oh yes indeed!

 

[WT]

Nostalgia?

Ya. True. You should see my 'nostalgia' pile. I still have an old 386/20 Gateway server case (AT) that I upgraded 8 years ago to a PIII/1000 on a PC Chips AT mATX board.

http://www.wtslair.com/ProjectGW/ProjectGW.html

I always thought it'd be cool to have an Abit BH6 board framed and on the wall in my man-cave, with a Voodoo 2 card in there as well, so I guess I'm just a geek at heart.

 

[PingSpike]

I still have a canopus voodoo1 in my closet as well.

I saw a lot of people say they could just play their old games on the old hardware...but I don't want to maintain 12 PCs. And a VGA only passthrough PCI card doesn't work well with my DVI widescreen monitor. There's actually a fair number of games from that era that never really worked that great with anything but voodoo. Obviously, updating the games would be best but that isn't going to happen in most cases.

 

[ichy]

I would love to be able to play Jane's F-15 again.

 

[DominionSeraph]

I always thought it'd be cool to have an Abit BH6 board framed and on the wall in my man-cave, with a Voodoo 2 card in there as well, so I guess I'm just a geek at heart.

My BH6 was in 12/7/364 operation until a couple days ago. Poor thing started random rebooting so I had to pull it off the line.
As memtest ran flawlessly, I'm hoping it was just the 11 year old Channel Well PSU.

 

[htwingnut]

I still have two 12MB Voodoo 2 cards with SLI cable... call me a geek. Unfortunately I used my BH6 board to practice some soldering before I did a mod on a laptop I had. Needless to say my mod was a failure so it was all for naught.

 

[pmv]

I have two win98se boxes - a 1G P3 and a 1.1G Celeron. Both were 'found', having been thrown out by someone else. One has a gf 5900, the other a voodoo3 (kept it from when it was actually a decent card).

The only thing I've ever used them for is running Janes USAF and the duke nukem pinball game balls of steel, neither of which work on XP, and which I got an urge to play again. Mostly they just sit there, taking up space!

Though almost every glide game seems to work on modern cards, using one or other of the many,many glide wrappers out there. None of the wrappers work with more than a handful of games, but between them they seem to cover most stuff.

 

[hooflung]

Windows 95 'Chicago' actually used MS Dos 7.0 when it was in beta. MS DOS 7.0 was never released and I suppose some people might call it 6.3 however I had a copy of MS DOS 7.0 during the Chicago beta and I will tell you that it was 100% from Chicago and it was the only way you could play some Dos games like Mortal Kombat 2 prior to its own release.

The 90's were great for beta testers! MSDos7 also allowed you to run Doom 2 without making your own boot disk in most cases as were the cases back then when you needed to run a stripped hi-mem setup.