JHRobotics
No games work.
Every game I try crashes or falls back to software rendering. Is there a list of things that actually **work** with this driver, I've tried a ton of popular games that should work on Windows 98 and literally none of them work. I'm using latest VMware on Windows 10 with Windows 98SE. It feels like someone is taking the piss with a hoax driver, which is to put it mildly, fucking annoying.
Surely this driver can't be as useless as it appears, Is there a list of games that are supposed to work somewhere?
I've had success building my own qemu-3dfx and using SoftGPU for OpenGL pass-through 3D acceleration so the driver does work. Can't speak for performance or usage on VMware but I'd be interested to hear how it goes.
Not sure what you did, but soft GPU works great - if you set up everything correctly. I even successfully got "Prince of Persia - Sands of Time" working!
But the recent versions of virtualbox are simply crap and crashes the system with a BSOD all the time :-( You get the best experience with "VMware Workstation 17.5", which you can get for free.
Also when installing win98, disable CPU acceleration until you have windoof with patch9x installed.
It is not perfect though, some games simply crash, run too fast or run too slowly. For example, the games "Aliens Versus Predator 2" or "Drakan - Order of the Flame" will never run smoothly regardless of the configuration :-(
Also "Red Faction" runs too fast and is unplayable - which is btw. not the fault of softGPU, but rather a too fast host CPU (AMD Ryzen 7950X).
Also use GPUv10, if possible. It runs much better due to vulkan/dx12 translation layer, but for DX7/8 games use v9 - which requires a different hardware configuration than v10. Also do not use 2 GB of RAM for v9, because lots of older games don't like that much and complain or even don't start at all.
Very important! Do not use the NVIDIA Driver 576.x or ones that includes RTX 5000 when using any kind of hypervisor on windows 11. That is absolute garbage and is unstable like hell, creating tons of BSOD "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL". Older versions before work just fine, but those may have the downside of not compatible with modern games/software.
VMware Workstation 17.5 is what I'm using although I have tried QEMU and VirtualBox and came back to VMware because it has slightly better integration than QEMU and was dramatically faster and more stable than VirtualBox.
I think I just have the luck to have a collection of games that are incompatible with SoftGPU.
I downloaded some games that I'm not interested in playing like Battle Arena Toshinden 2 and Moto Racer and found that they work fine. On the other hand Quake II crashes instantly when I try to enter the game with anything except software rendering turned on.
Quake II does work in OpenGL mode with the latest version of SoftGPU, but due to a regression in how it handles resolution changing, that version is unusable for me in VMware, hopefully someone will fix it before release, but knowing my luck it's going to be permanently fucked in VMware and I'll be stuck on the old and broken version forever.
VMware Workstation 17.5 is what I'm using although I have tried QEMU and VirtualBox and came back to VMware because it has slightly better integration than QEMU and was dramatically faster and more stable than VirtualBox.
VMware is the far superior hypervisor when it comes to gaming support:
- Much better mouse integration with the ability to change the mode
- Better keyboard integration
- Properly scaled window/fullscreen on aspect ratio
- Tools for windows 98 with working drag & drop and mouse support
But VMware has downsides too:
- Mouse integration is buggy and requires multiple VM restarts to make it work
- Development has fully stopped, no more updates
- Documentation is extremely poor (you can change some settings in the VMX only!)
- No way to downgrade the X86 instruction set, to e.g. pentium 3/4, core 2, etc.
- Bad audio support (only Ensonic PCI 128)
- No CD/DVD cue image support
Is true for all hypervisors:
- VM's crashes a lot, when you experiment with soft gpu
- More recent NVIDIA driver are full on crap and its a gamble if is works or not
I think I just have the luck to have a collection of games that are incompatible with SoftGPU.
Me too, i have a lot of games that won't run with SoftGPU, but there are a lot that actually works.
Some can be fixed by re-installing SoftGPU after the games has been installed, because some games overwrite directx/opengl DLL's and kill everything.
We need a thread of some sort, people can post infos which games work and what they did to get it to working and one post that contains games that won't work at all.
Quake II does work in OpenGL mode with the latest version of SoftGPU, but due to a regression in how it handles resolution changing, that version is unusable for me in VMware, hopefully someone will fix it before release, but knowing my luck it's going to be permanently fucked in VMware and I'll be stuck on the old and broken version forever.
Same on my side, glide does not work for any of the quake engine based games, but opengl and software works.
But its not fully broken. Turok (3Dfx only) and even Rollcage (Glide) works just fine.
Not only NVIDIA drivers, are broken.
My problem with VMware is that is pure close source, and it is very difficult to find out what is happening inside. SVGA SDK is very outdated and the only code related to current versions is in Linux kernel.
Also refresh rate from guest to host screen seems be much lower than in VirtualBox or QEMU.
Glide in Q2 games should work but needs to replaced 3dfxgl.dll with newer version (use MiniGL 1.49). In Q3 games not (or isn't very stable), but Q3 games works with native opengl usually well - there is only buffer overflow with extension string).
A games compatibility database will definitely be needed, when I have stabler releases (something like BETA1), I'll start work on it.
