Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

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Graf Zahl
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by Graf Zahl »

Kinsie wrote: I'd probably give it until the start of the first console generation to properly support this stuff, possibly about a year in, before ray-tracing ultimately settles in as The Compulsory Thing. So probably... three and a half years at the barest of minimums.

Agreed. But let's not forget: When hardware rendering first appeared, the same kind of skepticism was shown. When programmable shaders became usable the same thing repeated. And now it also seems that most of the tech journalists have no clue what it could mean if this thing really worked, let alone the majority of gamers.
If it works it will shake up the industry, but logically it will take a bit of time to mature. But someone has to start, and NVidia just did that.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by SouthernLion »

Chris wrote:
RexS wrote:I remember when Halo 2 came out, it *required* Vista, but on DAY ONE a cracker made a patch for it to run on XP flawlessly. lol
It required Vista as a result of using DirectX 10, which MS didn't make available on XP as an attempt to force people to buy Vista. However, some people were able to hack in some limited DX10 compatibility into XP.
Nope. https://megagames.com/news/no-dx10-halo-2
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by drfrag »

To me it's clear that Doom 3 was developed with win 98 in mind and the XP requirement was a last minute change, after all 98 SE came out in 99 and Doom 3 was released in 2004 (a dev version was leaked in 2002).
It ran fine on 98 and the patch to make it work was a very simple modification, just changing GlobalMemoryStatusEx to GlobalMemoryStatus in the exe with a hex editor.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by Graf Zahl »

drfrag wrote:To me it's clear
Don't bet on it. My guess is that the main reason was stability issues that made product support for 98 problematic to begin with. These things are commonly underestimated even by professional developers, but very, very relevant for management and QA. Just judging from the used API won't do it, because games do not commonly use the stuff that was new in XP.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by Rachael »

I was using Windows 2000 full time in those days - not XP or 98. :)

It was slightly slower than the other two but I liked it and it felt a lot more stable.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by SouthernLion »

Rachael wrote:I was using Windows 2000 full time in those days - not XP or 98. :)

It was slightly slower than the other two but I liked it and it felt a lot more stable.
Windows 2000 was one of the better Microsoft Operating Systems in my opinion. Despite not being marketed for home, it was MUCH better than "ME". By the time I went to XP there was a bunch of Service Packs and it was pretty stable, though. I skipped Vista, went to 7. Skipped 8, went to 10.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by Cacodemon345 »

Windows 2000 was also the only NT OS that didn't fuck stuff like DirectDraw up which XP did. It also seems to work better and had a couple of cool features like the ability to listen to sound, music without opening up Windows Media Player.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by Graf Zahl »

DirectDraw got "fucked up" because it was a technology that severely was at odds with hardware and security developments of the time. The same happened to DirectSound a few years later. This kind of direct hardware access was just a failed attempt of bringing DOS concepts to Windows.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by Cacodemon345 »

DirectDraw actually got "fucked up" as GPU vendors went and rushed for supporting Windows Vista that got released in 2006 with its newer WDDM model and Windows Aero that was to be supported, alongside DX10. I had such a 2007 desktop computer using Intel GMA 3100 GPU. I ran some DirectDraw games with Windows XP and they worked better, like Age of Empires 2, but which didn't really work that well in Windows 7 suffering from more severe palette issues (I think). Hell, one DirectDraw game that I ran had lower frame-per-second on Win7, which had higher frame-per-second when ran on XP.

I ran source ports all these years on a 2012 laptop that I had, which actually turned out to be better than what my desktop computer was.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by Graf Zahl »

Like I said, much of DirectDraw's inner workings were completely at odds with how computers developed so some games which were extremely tweaked for DDraw's peculiarities couldn't cope when the underlying system changed. Even ZDoom back then contained some "highly optimized" DDraw code, which of course went all down the drain with Windows Vista and 7. Actually, it lost its purpose long before that.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by leileilol »

Doom3 doesn't even require an updated DirectX. A stock no-service-pack Windows 2000 install (which would ship DX7) can run it unmodified

And I think the original 1.0 release was just a message check and didn't call a Ex routine.... The early breakage of games usually involved other shell functions that related to appdata paths or my documents (screwing 95). Later on it started to be about process management (for threading or crash handling) and then there's that big Visual C runtime regression later on.

Realistically, a getproc here and there would help maintain proper Win9x support in Doom3 easily. Doom3 was defective by design whereas FarCry and Half-Life 2 (the other big games in 2004 at the time of 2004) weren't.

However supporting Voodoo2? lol no. I've originally completed Doom3 on a Geforce2 and that's not "supported" either, but is feature complete enough with the supported Geforce4MX and everything rendered properly. You only really miss out on a bit of texture detail and the occasional refractive glass or shockwave. I retired my Voodoo2 for 5 years by that point.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by Graf Zahl »

leileilol wrote:Doom3 was defective by design
That really means "We do not want our support to be bothered by low end users."
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by kingdomakrillic »

Shame that SwiftShader doesn't work with Doom 3. I was hoping to combine the Voodoo 2 mod's graphics downgrades with affline texture mapping.
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by leileilol »

a D3D9 software renderer isn't going to work with an OpenGL game...
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Re: Doom 3 running on Windows 98 with a 3dfx Voodoo 2

Post by SouthernLion »

leileilol wrote:a D3D9 software renderer isn't going to work with an OpenGL game...
Doom 3 was OpenGL?

Actually, that kind of makes sense...
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