dosbox-pure
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schellingb
3dfx Glide support, is this a planned feature in the long run?
Having 3dfx support baked in this core would be neat, but I have no idea whatsoever how hard such a task would be to implement in this core.
There are quite a few games from the MS-DOS era that utilizes the proprietary 3dfx hardware acceleration, the first game that comes to mind is Carmageddon, its mission pack Carmageddon Splat Pack and GTA 1. Having 3dfx support combined with the ability to use higher screen resolutions than 640x480 (or was it 640x400) could be neat, there are already some DOSBox builds (non-libretro, standard ones) with 3dfx support integrated.
There is a 3dfx patch for DOSBox floating around that does seem to be quite easy to integrate. At least the software rendering variant. To convert this core to a hardware accelerated 3D core would be quite a task. If the software rendered 3dfx emulator provides both performance and an image quality better than the software renderer already available in most DOS games, then this would be very nice to have indeed. Evaluating this is on my todo list...
You should take a look at Dosbox-ECE it has 3dfx support built in and you don't need a wrapper. It can translate glide into opengl or run in software mode, a wrapper is optional also.
Hey, so this was added just now in version 0.9.5. See the new release here! It should also be in the online core updater of RetroArch in a few hours.
It's just software emulation for now but I added some simple multi-threading to make it somewhat usable at least on desktop PCs. I did "play" Quake 3 inside Windows 98 on my Android phone at 3 FPS for a bit though, that was exciting :-)
any possibility of being able to emulate newer voodoo gpu's or gpu's with support for newer versions of directx? as in some cases software rendering using the emulated pentium is faster than using glide
Currently the 3dfx emulation is being done 100% on the host CPU. Which, yes, is often slower than the highly optimized software renderers of those old games.
The goal really should be to offload the 3dfx rendering onto a real GPU on the host. But as of now DOSBox Pure is a "software rendering libretro core" so it isn't that easy to modify it to run with OpenGL or Vulkan. And even if the core could be changed to run in a 3d accelerated context, the translation from the emulated 3dfx to OpenGL or something else needs to be added.
Someone mentioned to me that the 3dfx emulation in PCem is also 100% done on the CPU but it being much faster than what we currently have. As an alternative it might be worth looking into what PCem is doing different that makes it so much better.
Hi, have installed the games "Grand Theft Auto" and "Lands of Lore 2 - Guardians of Destiny" (with Patch 1.30) with the current version 0.9.7. Both games have 3dFX support in their DOS version. However, the games apparently do not recognize emulated 3dFX hardware.
Is there anything else to consider here or any limitations?
