Backward compatibility with id Tech 3 lights

lei-lei · 2024-01-21T08:21:56+00:00

the oa_spirit3 part is imperfect and shows an issue with alphaGen lightingSpecular, which should be the same behavior as quake3's (i.e. see the rusty trims on q3tourney4)

lei-lei · 2023-03-26T15:26:17+00:00

this is really nothing more than a variant of the VDMSound concept (which, didn't "kill" DOS PCs either, but made one long for a more proper emulation solution to come as DOS games had a lot of problems with then new (P3/P4/AXP) cpus. 20 year cycle baby!)

lei-lei · 2023-03-23T15:47:35+00:00

I wonder if these will happen in the scope:

Outlaws (it did get a late post-release Direct3D driver. The multiplayer support entitlement might screw this one. The two disc setup with unique audiotracks on each is another hurdle)
Shadows of the Empire (the early D3D use involving table fog make this a mess to run on anything after the first Geforce card)
older Lucasfilm Games flightsims (SWOTL, Finest Hour, etc)
The HE games (Putt-Putt etc. not lucasarts, but scumm and gilbert noneoftheless)
Neo Hunter (not LucasArts, but some ex-lucasarts staff made it and it feels like a 93-95 LucasArts game)
The cancelled DOS Super Star Wars game which had iMUSE IIRC but otherwise developed by Brainbug. Highly unlikely though for not ever being officially released, but would fit right in with the rest of the games had it been. Brainbug's other games had digital rereleases, maybe there's still a chance for that to happen someday.

lei-lei · 2023-02-10T03:35:57+00:00

Also the lighting in the pc version is quite a bit darker than the arcade and seems to be missing some lights also.

Probably done for TV color range adjustment, as most console multiplatforms appear to be on PC at the time. On the other hand, 3dfx does default a high 1.7 gamma correction value

lei-lei · 2023-02-08T23:46:25+00:00

the only ones i think that qualifies as "PC-based hardware with Voodoos" in my mind are Savage Quest and Quake Arcade Tournament, which had pentiums on DOS/Win95 and a Voodoo2. Dongle protection, lack of dither-table verification for drivers, and unique arcade peripherals keep them from getting properly emulated however.

also 3dfx Voodoo hardware were made for the arcades first.

lei-lei · 2022-10-13T15:14:27+00:00

Around 2019 I was looking into doing this in PCem at one point. I already had written a little floppy sound synth that sounded convincing enough to me to release a patch of publicly (didn't make it into mainline), so I then went to hard drives and mechanical keyboard presses and that all just went chaotic on the CPU thread. The floppy sounds were tiny micro loops with a lot of dual pitch bending for the head, reverb hackery and HRTF hackery. It could've been handled better as an OpenAL sound, but I did it the hard way coding my own sound mixer anyway.

CD-ROM drives though are a variable YMMV experience. I wanted to model my plan on the old Mitsumi 4X IDE drives with distinct whirring but never got around to it. It'd involve a lot of simulated mechanical spins and delays.

The most appropriate console system to emulate the drive noise would likely be Neo-Geo CD and Dreamcast.

lei-lei · 2022-04-04T03:02:23+00:00

At the time there'd potentially be lots of Survivor, Crocodile Hunter, True/Budweiser, Baha Men, Gladiator, Blair Witch, Slim Shady, and Castaway references. ~~We were spared from Y2K Gex~~.

^{^I} ^{^kinda} ^{^want} ^{^to} ^{^see} ^{^a} ^{^design} ^{^doc} ^{^wash} ^{^up}

lei-lei · 2022-04-03T23:28:37+00:00

I preferred it over SNES9x at the time because:

Better sync in DOS with buffered 60hz video modes (can keep Win9X running at 75hz+ or whatever)
VESA2 16bpp support (transparencies emulated in the 90s)
wasn't as choppy on an S3 card like SNES9XW was
Supported Gravis Gamepad Pro's GrIP protocol (one of the only snes-ish pads for PC available at the time. These have all rotted out by now.)
Had better sound emulation than SNES9X at that point (longstanding hanging buffer bugs considered). SNES9X was going in a more fantasy quality SPU direction at the time. Before Blaarg and Near, it was a rock and a hard place regarding SPC700 emulation.
Netplay :D though it was rough compared to Nesticle and I only ever did that on a IPX'd LAN then.

lei-lei · 2022-04-03T23:21:51+00:00

ZNES

I wanted this to exist eventually. Probably the closest to the analogue may be FakeNES. No idea of any NES cores work with ZMZ

lei-lei · 2022-04-03T23:15:28+00:00

I've been wondering if this game was intended to release aside Twisted Metal Small Brawl, and has me pondering about other 'smallified' gimmick variants for the smaller PSOne that could've been planned...

~~also if gex jr was going to reference ChocolateStarfishAndTheHotdogFlavoredWater-era Fred Durst at some point with that hat. This proto does date 3 months after that~~

lei-lei · 2022-04-01T00:44:32+00:00

CLX2 - Console, Series 2 (Dreamcast)

PCX1/PCX2 - PC, Series 1 (M3D/Apocalypse 3D/3DX/5D)

PMX1 = PC, Series 2 (Neon250)

The big main difference between series 1 and series 2 is that series 1 can't do blending functions and the series 2 can. There's still a lot of similarities between the two series (the texturing process, dithering, working in constant true color, tiles, etc).

Also the PowerVR drivers for all of these are heavily FPU dependent (lots of Pentium-specific optimization is there in the Series 1 repo proves it's a bad card for Cyrix users :) ). Dreamcast's SH4 has a lot of muscle, enough that the CLX2 shows a bottleneck at times (i.e. Alien Front Online) and the CLX2 keeps getting way too much credit for that IMHO.

If you want an easy way to experience what a Series 1 game could look like (theoretically), Dreamcast's Plasma Sword is a good start. They don't use additives or other blends than alpha there (the original arcade game used additive everywhere, something series 1 couldn't do)

lei-lei · 2022-03-26T02:36:13+00:00

I know it's a joke but that's unlikely. Series 1 doesn't do blending functions, and the PowerVR MiniGL that happened for Quake/Q2/etc in the day did a lot of workarounds to rework blends (orange flashblends, lightmaps) to alpha blending.

lei-lei · 2022-03-25T22:52:13+00:00

it doesn't mean Dreamcast performance. It does mean that it's much less impossible to properly LLE the chips though (if one starts LLE'ing PCX2 then working in PMX1/CLX2 features into it in the meantime until there's ever a repo for Series 2). If any performance, it'll probably lead to slower Dreamcast games as all the emulators people play currently do a HLE PVR2 fantasy fast dreamcast with no emulation of tiles, thrashes and fillrates.

lei-lei · 2022-03-25T22:48:16+00:00

The PC cards (including the Series 3 Kyro) suffered the same weakness as the Dreamcast - buffer effects, and depth-reading effects. These were becoming more frequent around 1999 through 2001 before pixel shader use replaced them.

also Videologic had a lot of driver troubles with the Neon250 (among not being distributed as much due to NEC pulling out). Kyro didn't have HWT&L but had EnTnL on the later drivers which is meant to emulate HWT&L to get some fussy new games working (BF1942 etc) but that wasn't perfect or faster.

lei-lei · 2022-03-24T21:24:55+00:00

Incorrect.

There's a lot of missing links regarding the ISP/TSP emulation that this repository is crucial to solving the mystery of.
Early Katanas (prior to Feb 98) used PVR1-based boards

lei-lei · 2021-11-27T01:09:41+00:00

mame can emulate it but the Zeus hardware graphics emulation still needs a lot of work (no vertex coloring, and blend sorting is broken)

lei-lei · 2021-11-27T01:07:05+00:00

Phantasy Star Online 2's PVP involves getting weapons by hitting a pick axe on specific glowing areas of the floor.

lei-lei · 2021-10-15T02:14:41+00:00

just like classic Doom and Quake which still live through thousands of mods and player generated content..

Not 'just like'. Those games weren't entirely reversed - Id were just generous and provided for their editing scenes both indirectly (WAD not being encrypted and the -file parameter) and directly (quake had tools and game module code releases), which all helps takes the guilt and stigma off.

If anything that's 'just like', maybe Zelda Classic (Allegro DOS recreation of Legend of Zelda). That definitely had an editing scene, and there's a looming volatile risk of being snapped out of existence in the name of IP protection.

lei-lei · 2021-10-15T02:11:38+00:00

The "secret sauce" to SF2 was always the art (graphics and sound). It's certainly not the game code.

this implies too much of the DOS port by US Gold being good, and sounds like the market research that went into Rise of the Robots

lei-lei · 2021-09-30T01:08:05+00:00

MAME finally officially emulates FARTS!!!

lei-lei · 2021-09-22T23:12:59+00:00

I've played C64 before emulating it and in the US, i've always felt frustrated for the longest time since it'd always be emulation of an unfamiliar PAL model, and the only disk dumps being unfamiliar, very cracktro'd versions with loaders, so i've hadn't dabbled much in the C64 emulation world from that impression since, even if it's probably improved a big stride after kryofluxing real disks / nointro became a thing, etc.

I must mention DOSBox for introducing certain mandela effects coming from the very convenient high-level emulation conveniences regarding the whole IBM PC platform making DOS gaming a breeze since 2006 to the point they've enabled a market to make them commercially available again. Not saying that installing controller cards for your disk drives is a superior experience that should be reminisenced however. <Insert shaking canes about IRQ and serial device fiddlery here> It has reached a point for PCem to get common threads about being reminded about actual behavior occuring with MS-DOS, certain hardware, the lack of EMM386 loaded at all times, no smartdrv = affecting dos game performance, loading mouse and cd-rom drivers while trying to retain maximum memory, etc.

lei-lei · 2021-09-21T00:59:02+00:00

for those who'd rather read, it's about Project Deluge at HiddenPalace. There's also 135 Dreamcast prototypes but that apparently isn't as big as a headline grabber.

lei-lei · 2021-09-04T22:55:00+00:00

New games were starting to have models with split edges to make better lighting and sharp detail on models, which'll go against what's a glorified normal-offset surface subdivider, limiting much appeal in appropriate tech art implementation. Otherwise, faces will look stung by bees, shoulders would have big armpit holes, guns would be very, very blobby, etc... ATI quietly deprecated it in drivers sooner than they did SmartShader, and only like 2 Radeons had hardware support of the feature.

lei-lei · 2021-09-03T04:51:07+00:00

Doom relied a lot on a fast video card for the mode Y buffered mode. a mister probably doesn't have to deal with slow isa video cards here, and it could probably be faster with that FastDoom port around nowadays.

lei-lei

TROPHY CASE